After publishing USB Image Tool 1.27 about a month ago on a single shareware page (softpedia.com), it has become somewhat of a success with over 12000 downloads from my page alone, not counting the various shareware/freeware archives, it became listed in. I recieved some feedback through comments with questions, feature requests and thanks. Be assured, that every feedback is welcome, even if you just want to say “thanx”.
As a result I have added a FAQ and a feature request list to the program page to adress the most common questions. If you wish to contact me and don’t want to post a comment you can also mail to alex(#)alexpage.de or software(#)alexpage.de (for spam protection please replace the (#) by the mail sign @).
THX for your Tool, and it would be nice to have a larger FAQ/requests/bugs section with some links for easy finding it.
When the Linux-Partition will be implement would the program still working under Windows or will be also ported to linux?
In actual stage by backup and restore are only the files copied or also the boot sequence and all partitions on the stick? I like to work with some sticks with ubuntu 8.04 and really like to know that the whole system would be saved and restored properly.
Could you simply explain how the zip-function work(as example I got a 4GB image file from a 4GB USB stick that has only 1GB with data on it)?
Hello,
the USB Imagetool is great. The only problem I have is for
USB devices larger than 4 GB. It crashes after reaching 4 GB image
file size. Do I something wrong?
Greetings
Michael
Maybe it is caused by the partition type of the target hard drive. To my knowledge FAT32 is limited to a maximum of 4GiB. USB Image Tool itself uses 64bit variables for all size calculations.
Hello again,
my 8 GB stick is NTFS formatted and contains a full windows installation with boot sector. The error message says that USB Image Tools is not able to save the image file to disk. This happens when it already reached about 4100 MB. I started the USB Image Tools as a normal windows application from the harddrive with the USB stick applied as additional USB drive i. e. windows was not booted from this stick.
Greetings
Michael
What I’m trying to ask is, if the target hard drive, where you want to save the image, is FAT32 formatted. Another possibility is, that there is not enough space on the target hard drive to save a 8GB image file. The message means, that there has been a problem with writing the image file, not with reading the USB device. I have implemented different error messages for that. If you can, please try to save the image to another drive and check the partition type and free disk space of the target hard drive. With the next version I will add a more detailed error message.
Hello Alex,
thanks for your patience. Indeed, the target drive I wanted the image to write on is FAT32 fromatted. Now I tried to write to a NTFS drive and it works. Surprisingly the image has nearly 8 GB although the USB stick is filled by half only. Wouldn’t it be a nice option to split large image files into 2 or 4 GB slices? Thanks again.
Michael
This is a really neat, tidy piece of work, my compliments.
Now instead of formatting USB and copy/paste setting i can build on one USB main frame, backup & deploy.
I look forward to the future developments.
I have one bootable pendrive and I´ve tried to make a backup from it.
As soon as a “.img” file has appeared in my local HD, the pendrive has been erased.
I´ve tried to restore this “.imp” file into the pendrive but, althoug it seems like if it works, I can´t see any file in the pendrive (when I go to “Properties” it says 339Mb used and 621Mb free, as it was at the begining).
How can I recover all initial information in the pendrive?
Thanks
Hello,
First I need some more information to tell, what happened. When creating a backup, no data is written to to USB stick.
In detail, it is opened in read only mode an all data is read from the partition to be written to the image file. Currently bootable USB sticks can’t be duplicated, because the boot sector isn’t copied. The image still contains the
data, but after restoring the image the pendrive may not be bootable, because the boot loader might be missing in the boot
sector. Copying these drives will be possible with version 1.30. Nevertheless it is strange that data is lost after just creating a backup.
Some questions:
What Windows version are you using?
What version of USB Image Tool were you using?
What operating system was on the stick?
What partitions were used (FAT32/NTFS/ext2/3/etc.)?
Does the pendrive still appear as a valid drive on the workplace?
Can you open the image file with image tool (for example WinImage (www.winimage.com))?
If not, does the size of the image file seem to be valid?
Have you checked NT user rights & hidden files settings?
Regards,
Alexander Beug
Nice utility!
But I ‘d like to see in it the ability to mount saved image as a drive. Make it if possible please! As far as I know, there’s no such emulation tool and You’ll be THE FIRST!!!
I got an error when trying to backup an 8GB flash drive as a compressed image. Can the error and FAQ be more specific and less vague about this problem (some more explanation)? Maybe a ZIP format limitation? More people are going to use higher capacity flash drives and will encounter this problem too.
I had to manually RAR the 8GB file to compress it.
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Error!
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Compressed images can only be created upto 4 GiB!
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OK
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@Xp1: I will expand the FAQ to explain this a little bit better. It’s a combination on zip’s format limitations and the external resources I use to create zip files. Nevertheless you can create gzip images larger than 4Gib when you activate this option.
“I’m locked out of my sandisk 4gb cruzer. by failing 3 password attempts.. is there anyway i can retrieve my data??”
I have a 4gb sandisk cruzer,, which i went after a while to check my data.. n attempted to put what i thought was the right password and the system only gave me 3 tries before my data would be permanently inaccessible… now its only giving the option to format the flashdrive.. i dont want to lose my data.. is there anyway i can retrieve my data plzz help!!!
If you have an encrypted flash drive, USB Image Tool can’t do anything about that. How should it, btw? You should contact the vendor of the encryption program.
USB Image Tool is really a great utility. A similar tool for working with SD cards would be great. Would you please consider adding support for SD cards to USB Tools… or possibly developing an ‘SD Image Tool’ app? Many Thanks.
@caliuser: USB Image Tool also supports USB attached card readers. Some cards/readers might require the the newest version and possibly the hdd option activated.
Greetings. With great anticipation I downloaded the USB Image Tool.
Installed well on my [recently upgrade from Windows 8.1 against my will 🙂 ] Windows 10.1 64-bit Acer laptop.
The Tool runs; but DOES NOT DISPLAY ‘attached’ 2 USB external Hard Disk Drives I have aliased as G: and H: respectively (one USB2, the other USB3).
Both USB HDDs display in Windows/File Explorer, both are attached via a USB3 4-port hub.
The Tool DOES DISPLAY a 128gB USB2 portable ‘flash’ or thumb drive I use for portable apps including critical email, usually as J:
I had hope to back up the J: portable drive to the H: attached external HDD Drive. That actually works.
I was worried at first, but have the tool working for me, and am most appreciative.
If you have some time, I would appreciate a comment as to why USB HDDs don’t display as a source, only as a target.
Thanks much.
@Jude: Please activate the USB HDD option on the options tab. This should solve it.