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
Dear Alex, first of all thank you for your great and useful work.
I just want to ask you…. I’ve an usb key that appears to the system as “local disk” and not as a “removable storage”. In this way The Image Tool doesn’t see it. Formatting hasn’t sorted any effect. Do you have some work araound or suggestion ?!
thanks in advance.
Bye
Frank
USB Image Tool only recognizes removable storage devices and filters everything else. It was originally not intended to work with disks. Just formatting a drive doens’t change anything on how Windows recognizes an USB device. As far as I know you can do some dirty registry hacks to make Windows recognize a pen drive as a portable hard disk and vice versa, but I wouldn’t recommend that. Another point is, that SATA drives appear under the USB note in the registry, so mixing up the local hard drives with the flash drives wouldn’t be a good idea either. Maybe USB Image Too, will support protable USB drives in the future, but I have to take a deeper look into this.
Hi Alex.
I stumbled upon your little gem today and must say I’m pretty impressed. So far I have only tested the creation of images and found it extremely fast (about 11 min for 8GB – usually takes me more than 30 minutes to back up my stick). Not to mention the advantage of having just one file instead of 10.000+ … Just great!
Pls allow me a couple of comments and suggestions:
1- I have read the explanation in the FAQ why the image is always as large as the volume. However, even in times of cheap HDDs, it appears a waste to me to use 8GB for my only 3,5GB on the stick. Could you maybe offer a tool to “empty” the unused parts of my stick? Or include a mode that only backs up the actula data?
2 – I would find it great if the program would offer (maybe as an option) the name+date as filename of the backup. Don’t know if others see this as useful, but for regular backups it would avoid me having to type this myself each time 😉
3 – some help docs might be useful for the future – I read in the notes that there are commandline options, couldn’t discover any explanation on these however.
You may include me to the beta-testers if you need one more. Keep up the great work!
Chris
Thanks for your feedback on USB Image Tool.
1 – As I tried to explain in the FAQ, USB Image Tool would have to implement different file systems to do anything in this direction. Here is some more information why emptying the unused parts of a flsh drive isn’t a good idea. An alternative would be to create a master image and then only store the changes relative to the master image. At least that’s the way Virtual PC and other Virtual evironments are handling this issues. On the negative this would require a tool to merge master image and changes to create an image with the most recent information in case you need to restore it, but it sounds interesting. Nevetheless it would be some more difficult task.
2 – This is a good suggestion. I will implement something like that in the next version.
3 – The command line options are for the usbitcmd.exe. If you start it in a windows shell, it shows all necessary information. I’ve attached it here:
usbitcmd [mode] [device] [file] [/c] [/d]
mode defines the operation mode:
l list detected USB mass storage devices
d show USB mass storage device details
b backup a USB mass storage device to an image file
r restore an image file to a USB mass storage device
device USB device number (reported in list mode)
file image file for backup or restore
/c compressed image file (imz)
/g compressed image file (gzip)
/d use device mode (for bootable devices)
/i ignore size checks for gzip images
/h create MD5 checksum in backup mode
Hallo Alex,
ich habe schon einige Male dein USB Image Tool ohne Probleme benutzt. Jedoch jetzt auf eimal sind die Knöpfe “Restore” und “Backup” nicht aktiv (grau), und es stehen keine Informationen über dem USB-Gerät in dem Device-Tag. Ich habe mehrere USB’s probiert, inkl. solche, die ich schon mit deinem Software erfolgreich bearbeitet habe. Auch die neueste Version 1.50 beta funktioniert nicht. Was ist auf eimal los? Bitte um Hilfe!
Danke
Ein Screenshot per Mail oder Link wäre da hilfreich, außerdem Informationen über Betriebssystem und genaues Fehlerverhalten. Was passiert beim Anklicken eines Geräts in der Liste. passiert es bei allen UBS-Geräten? Wie regiert Windows auf diese Geräte?
Hallo ALex,
ich bekomme das Programm erst gar nicht gestartet ,es erscheint die Fehlermeldung 32bit.dll nicht verfügbar.
In der Fehlerlog steht folgendes:
See the end of this message for details on invoking
just-in-time (JIT) debugging instead of this dialog box.
************** Exception Text **************
System.DllNotFoundException: Unable to load DLL ‘usbit32.dll’: Die angegebene Prozedur wurde nicht gefunden. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8007007F)
at USB_Image_Tool.Usbit32.ClearDevices()
at USB_Image_Tool.FormUSB.DevicesScan()
at USB_Image_Tool.FormUSB.WndProc(Message& msg)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.ControlNativeWindow.OnMessage(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.ControlNativeWindow.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.NativeWindow.Callback(IntPtr hWnd, Int32 msg, IntPtr wparam, IntPtr lparam)
************** Loaded Assemblies **************
mscorlib
Assembly Version: 2.0.0.0
Win32 Version: 2.0.50727.1433 (REDBITS.050727-1400)
CodeBase: file:///C:/WINNT/Microsoft.NET/Framework/v2.0.50727/mscorlib.dll
—————————————-
USB Image Tool
Assembly Version: 1.5.0.0
Win32 Version: 1.5.0.0
CodeBase: file:///H:/USB%20Image%20Tool/USB%20Image%20Tool.exe
—————————————-
System.Windows.Forms
Assembly Version: 2.0.0.0
Win32 Version: 2.0.50727.1433 (REDBITS.050727-1400)
CodeBase: file:///C:/WINNT/assembly/GAC_MSIL/System.Windows.Forms/2.0.0.0__b77a5c561934e089/System.Windows.Forms.dll
—————————————-
System
Assembly Version: 2.0.0.0
Win32 Version: 2.0.50727.1433 (REDBITS.050727-1400)
CodeBase: file:///C:/WINNT/assembly/GAC_MSIL/System/2.0.0.0__b77a5c561934e089/System.dll
—————————————-
System.Drawing
Assembly Version: 2.0.0.0
Win32 Version: 2.0.50727.1433 (REDBITS.050727-1400)
CodeBase: file:///C:/WINNT/assembly/GAC_MSIL/System.Drawing/2.0.0.0__b03f5f7f11d50a3a/System.Drawing.dll
—————————————-
************** JIT Debugging **************
To enable just-in-time (JIT) debugging, the .config file for this
application or computer (machine.config) must have the
jitDebugging value set in the system.windows.forms section.
The application must also be compiled with debugging
enabled.
For example:
When JIT debugging is enabled, any unhandled exception
will be sent to the JIT debugger registered on the computer
rather than be handled by this dialog box.
Hoffe du kannst mir helfen ich würde das Proggy gerne benutzen.
Falls die Anwendung über eine Verknüpfung gestartet wird, muss das Arbeitsverzeichnis (Rechts-Click auf die Verknüpfung und dann Eigenschaften) das Programmverzeichnis sein, in dem auch die Exe liegt.
Hallo Alex,
nein das ist nicht das Problem,das stimmt alles …es liegt wohl daran das es auf Win2000 grundsätzlich nicht läuft.
Habe das ganze mit Vista probiert ,da geht ‘s einwandfrei.
Wäre schön wenn das auch auch W2k funktionieren würde…
VG Ichda
Win200 wird seit 1.24 wegen fehlender API-Funktionen nicht mehr unetrstützt. Mindestanforderung ist Windows XP .
Hey Alex:
I was wondering if you could put in a % in the command line version of your USB Image Tool? Instead of it just saying:
“Restoring backup to …..”
Have it do this:
“Restoring backup to …..”
“1% completed so far” etc etc.. and just have the % count up to 100%.
It would be great if you could add that :o)
Thanks for your time!
David
I will possibly do that. I need to check, what’s necessary to do cursor movements in the shell.
Maybe this will help, Alex?
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-shellcurses/?ca=dgr-lnxw06shellcurses&S_TACT=105AGX59&S_CMP=GR
David
Any luck, Alex?
David
Sorry, didn’t had the time to look into that. Quite busy with the job atm.
Hi Alex. Great piece of software – very useful indeed, and works perfectly.
Just a very quick question – when using ‘device mode’, is there any chance of viruses being introduced (via the back door) onto clean media even if the original USB drive is virus-free? Do I just need to ensure that my PC is also virus-free? My query is mainly around boot-sector viruses etc.
Thanks
Adrian
Because the device mode also copies the boot sector of the image to the USB flash drive, it would be possible to write an infected image to a flash drive, but an anti-virus software should be able to detect this.
Hey Alex, just wanted to pop in and say thank you for putting in the progress % in the final version of 1.50. That was really awesome of you to do :o)
Thanks again,
David
Hallo Alex
habs gefunden ist in usbitcmd.exe…