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 were 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.