Run Ubuntu Live CD From a USB Drive

I accidentally nuked my laptop’s 80G hard drive this morning (D’OH!) while shuffling around partitions. Supposedly there’s a valid windows (XP) installation on there still that’s about 20G. I’d love to repair it so I can use it today while I’m in the confocal room, but I don’t have an Ubuntu CD, Windows CD, or any CD for that matter! I looked around, but I guess blank CD-Rs aren’t something that’s standard in molecular biology laboratories. Anyhow, I wanted to install the new Ubuntu 8.10 Linux distribution, and I’ve downloaded the ISO, but since I can’t find a CD to burn it to I decided to try booting from a USB drive (something I’ve never done before). I found an AWESOME program which specialized in putting ISO files onto bootable USB drives. It’s called UNetBootin and it’s free (of course), runs on Linux or Windows, and has some built-in options for various linux distributions. I can repair my PC now! Yay!