The new version fixes two technical issues. The first one is the error code 3 (“The system cannot find the path specified”), that occured when you tried to restore your backup image after using your flash drive with the atv patchstick creator. Windows couldn’t detect the volume on the flash drive, resulting in an empty volume path. Locking this path failed and resulted in the error. This should be fixed with this version.

The second fix prevents USB Image Tool from restoring invalid images in device mode. A valid device mode image has to be multiple of 512. If that’s not the case, the write operation will fail with error code 87 close to the end of the process. To prevent this, USB Image Tool now checks, if the image file size is a multiple of 512.

Because it became more difficult to reply on feedback and error messages just by the Wordpress comment function, I have setup a small forum for support questions. I would like you to ask questions there, because it’s easier to keep track of the issues there. Also please make sure that you check the FAQ first. You can find the forum here.

The new version allows shared read access on the source image file, when using the Restore function. With this it is possible to write the same image file to different flash drives from one instance of USB Image Tool (or different instances as well).

It also catches a strange exception, that seems to happen when clicking on a link in the GUI. In some cases Windows can’t open the browser when just passing a URL to execute. For some reason my workstation seems to be affected since I re-installed it before christmas. Couldn’t find a reason for that on the web, only some workarounds. If calling the URL directly fails, it uses IE now.

Over the time I got plenty of  feedback regarding USB Image Tool. Some of it were bug reports or questions about (at first) unexplainable program behaviour. While a lot of the feedback was well described so I could immidiately figure out, what the author meant, some where in the way “It doesn’t work! Why?”. After 10 years of professional software development and 15 years of programming at all, I can only recommend you reading this document: How to Report Bugs Effectively by Simon Tatham. It’s really worth the time, funny to read and will benefit bug reporter as well as programmer. So before you report something, I would like to ask you to read there first.

Version 1.53 comes with the new option to truncate oversize image files to write it to smaller flash drives. Before using this option, read the FAQ about the way it has to be done and be aware of the consequences if you do it without the method described. This definitely isn’t an “always-on” setting. The FAQ also adresses the “smaller image file on larger flash drive” and “changing partition size” questions, so please read there first.

Also it fixes some issues with the automatic file name generation (replaces “:” and “/” with “-”)  and makes the device mode the default selection, when available (see FAQ as well).

Because of more comments asking for what a specific error code means, I decided to add a more detailed error message. It shows the text provided by Windows. Most of the error codes are usual code 5. In that case you most likely forgot to close the window, that got opened when you plugged in the USB flash drive. In that case the device can’t be locked and you can’t use Backup or Restore on this device. You have to close the opened window first.

Version 1.51 is a minor update and just fixes two interface flaws.

USB Image Tool 1.50 features all the changes already introduced with the beta version and adds some more features, of which two were requested by users. You can find all changes in the changelog and the download at the usual page. Thanks again to everybody who tested the beta version and especially to the people who gave feedback.

With version 1.50 I made the usbit32.dll multi-threaded, making it is possible to backup or restore multiple flash drives at the same time. Because I rewrote some major parts of the GUI app and the usbit32.dll, I decided to release a beta version first. If you can test the new version, your help would be much appriciated. If you give feedback, please try to explain in detail, what you did and maybe how a problem could be recreated. Important information is device or volume mode, error codes and the process you tested in general. Thanks in advance to all beta testers.

Download: USB Image Tool 1.50 beta

Version 1.42 can create MD5 checksums of image files during the backup process. This feature can be activated on the “Options” tab.

Next version will probably be 1.50. With this, I want to make the core I/O functions thread-safe, so you can work on multiple USB device at the same time. This would also allow a batch restore mode to write an image to multiple USB devices.