DasBoot is a free Macintosh utility that turns your iPod or USB flash drive into a bootable drive for your Mac. It also helps copy diagnostic and repair utilities onto the iPod or flash drive.

I checked it out… you need a bootable CDROM and an iPod or a flash drive. I believe that you can only create bootable flash drives on Intel Macintoshes, but you should be able to make bootable iPods on Intel or PPC machines.

Why do you want a bootable iPod or flash drive? Disk repair utilities generally can’t repair the volume you boot from, so if your Mac gets into trouble you’ll need to boot from a different disk than you normally do in order to try to fix it. Even if it’s not a disk problem, have a second device you can boot from is security against installing that piece of software that vomits all over your boot disk and leaves you to pick out the corn from the beans.
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