I have the horrible habit of not putting a label on a CD after I’ve burned it. This leads to having a stack of CDs and not knowing which does what. This was my problem recently when installing FreeBSD, so I decided to start using USB based installations where possible. I prefer the multiple-write capability of USB, and this way I don’t waste CDs. Step one is to download a modified unetbootin utility particularly for FreeBSD. You can get .rpm, .deb, .exe or .sh for both 32 and 64bit here. I went with the 32bit .sh file. BE CAREFUL WITH THE PACKAGED VERSIONS AS IT SEEMS THEY DEFAULT TO WRITING TO YOUR LOCAL DISK! Once you have the unetbootin utility downloaded you’ll want to write the data to your USB drive. This is done using the command: chmod +x unetbootin-freebsd70*.sh ./unetbootin-freebsd70*.sh installmode=usbdrive targetpartition=/dev/sdX1 formatpartition=yes|no Be sure you know which /dev entry your USB drive is connected to and don’t overwrite your existing boot loader on your main disk. Read more