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Is the empty bootsector just a series of zeros that makes up the first sector of the device? Is it an equivalent to what dd does as in the following unix command: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1 ?

What is the consequence of restoring this image of 512 bytes to the SUB drive? Does it make the drive partitionless, that is, like a floppy drive with no partition at all?

Usually, if one wants to see the new content of a drive that has been DD-imaged from an image file, the drive must be unplugged and replugged in. Do I have to do the same with USB Image Tool? It seems that I can see the contents with USB Image Tool without unplugging/replugging. Is this always true? What is the trick? Why I have to do this with dd?

Thanks!

Yes, it zeroes the first 512 bytes. By that, the drive appears partitionless. USB drives usually are formatted without partition tables (called Superfloppy format).After that, you have to reformat the drive, I recommend the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool (just google for it, it's freeware as well). The refresh of the drive is done by unmounting/remounting it using the way it's provided by the Windows API. I don't know, why dd doesn't do that, probably because it's a Linux/Unix port and just doesn't have this feature (uveryfied by me).