USB Image Tool 1.50 released

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.

Comments

  • Your USB tool has many promising features, but it does lack one ability which renders it nearly useless on my main computer.

    This computer is fairly old, so its original USB port only has the USB 1.1 standards implemented, making it much too slow for use with modern USB drive sizes. To work around that I’ve installed an add-on board with a full USB 2.0 interface including several new USB ports. So those new ports are the only USB ports I use for storage drives nowdays. (The old interface is only good for KB/mouse and similar stuff.)

    Unfortunately your “USB Image Tool.exe” does not recognize any USB drives connected to the new USB 2.0 ports, its drive list showing only those drives connected to an original USB 1.1 port.

    And using such USB 1.1 ports is naturally out of the question, with the horribly slow speed that this would result in.

    I believe that the problem lies in how your software looks for the USB interface of Windows, breaking off as soon as it finds one such interface, without checking for the possibility of another.

    I hope this problem can be solved in an upcoming release of your tool.

    Btw:
    I second the vote of one of your beta testers to add support for ‘local drive’ types as well, since limitations of windows has forced many people to patch the Windows driver registry for some USB sticks, in order to make the Windows disk manager allow multiple partitions. I realize the complication of the SATA drive classification, but hope that some way can be found to identify those drives, and sort them out of the drive list in your tool.

    Best regards: Ronald

  • Ooops!
    Apparently I was mistaken as to the reason for my failure to get drives recognized by your tool earlier, as I now suddenly do get it to recognize the same drives in the same ports that previously failed.

    This being the case I now have no clear idea as to why those drives never appeared in the drive list of your tool during my first experiments, which were made in exactly the same way, during what still is the same boot session of that same computer.

    It makes no sense at all to me, but it does mean that my theory about the reason for the earlier failures was clearly wrong, so just disregard that part. But the failures themselves were real, though I’ve no idea why they happened in the first series of tests but not in my current one…

    Best regards: dlanor

    • Thans for your feedback. I never got the chance to test USB Image Tool with an addon USB card, but it should work the same way as internal drive, as long as Windows recognizes the ports correctly. Did you by chance switch between device and volume mode? In volume mode, all devices, that are not a valid file system to windows, won’t be shown in the device list.

      For the multiple partitions issue, I’ve rad about the method to make Windows recognize a flash drive as a USB hard drive. If I find a way to distinguish SATA drives from USB drives (maybe by the used driver name), I probably will add this feature in the future.

  • First of all, many thanks for your nice and useful piece of work. However, while playing around, the cmdline utility produced a rather confusing output: I was creating a compressed image of a 8GB CF in device mode, using the command ‘usbitcmd.exe b 2204 test.img.gz /g /d /h /i’. Later on, I restored the image with ‘usbitcmd.exe r 2204 test.img.gz /g /d /i’, and the percentage counter went up to amazing 210%! At least, the restored data seemed ok. Trying to restore the same compressed image with the GUI resulted in an System.ArgumentOutOfRangeException when the progress bar hit the end. I can provide the detailed exception data if it helps.
    Second point is, ‘usbitcmd.exe l’ does only list FAT devices, but not my ext3 formated CF device (to be honest, I just checked those 2…). In the GUI, the ext3 CF is listed properly when selecting device mode.

    BR, Al

    • Thanks for your feedback on USB Image Tool. For the progress bar/counter issue I would be very interested in the details, especially the size information shown by the GUI. To list devices, that formatted with ext3, you can use the /d flag as well.

  • The exception message:
    —snip—
    Informationen über das Aufrufen von JIT-Debuggen
    anstelle dieses Dialogfelds finden Sie am Ende dieser Meldung.

    ************** Ausnahmetext **************
    System.ArgumentOutOfRangeException: Der Wert 101 ist für Value ungültig. Value sollte zwischen ‘minimum’ und ‘maximum’ liegen.
    Parametername: Value
    bei System.Windows.Forms.ProgressBar.set_Value(Int32 value)
    bei USB_Image_Tool.FormUSB.timerProgress_Tick(Object sender, EventArgs e)
    bei System.Windows.Forms.Timer.OnTick(EventArgs e)
    bei System.Windows.Forms.Timer.TimerNativeWindow.WndProc(Message& m)
    bei System.Windows.Forms.NativeWindow.Callback(IntPtr hWnd, Int32 msg, IntPtr wparam, IntPtr lparam)
    —snip—
    If you are interested in the loaded assemblies as well, please email me.
    The 8GB ext3-formated CF is listed in the GUI with a size of 8’195’604’480 Bytes, which matches the UNcompressed image size. The compressed image has a size of 618’080’060 Bytes.

    I’ve already tried the /d switch, but the ext3 device is not listed. I’m using one of those fancy all-in-one card readers for CF, SM, MMC etc.

  • Hi Alex!

    A very nice tool we have here!
    I’ve tested many images, it seems to had little bugs when I recovered with version 1.42 but seems somehow fixes with 1.5 😉
    Also, the only pb with this tool is that it cannot create image in ISO format or restore an ISO to an USB drive, this lacks a lot….
    Actually, I’m wondering what happen if I make a image of a particularly specific usb key to another one with different size….
    I’m continuing beta testing….
    Mrmagic

  • Hi Alex,

    It is a great tool. However, I noticed a issue that is stopping me from restoring my Linux image to my Kingston 8GB DataTraveler USB thunb drive. Whenever I am launching it from my Windows Vista system, I am not getting the Device Mode as that box is grayed out for me. I need to restore my Linux image in Device mode so that I can boot my Linux from USB.

    Another issue I found is, when I add the img or img.gz to Favourite, I can not get the Remove button enabled. Only Add and Restore button is enabled and Remove button never gets enabled. I am using the latest v1.50.

    • You have to run it as admin under Windows Vista. Please take a look at the FAQ for further information. The disabled Remove button on then favorites tab is a bug. I will fix that with the next version.

    • Thanks for your feedback. If your intending on putting a Linux Live CD on a flash drive, it is possible to boot it with the isolinux bootloader 3.72. For more information search the web for create hybrid usb cd isolinux. Just writing any iso image on a flash drive won’t work, as cd/dvd and flash drives/hard drives use different file systems. For this goes what is said in the FAQ, USB Image Tool won’t do any file system parsing or conversion.

  • Hi Alex!
    Can you help for something?
    If USBit cannot put an ISO to an usb thumbrive, can you tell us of a good tool to convert img/ima to Iso and ISo to Img/ima??
    This conversion is very important to many people.

    • Well, it isn’t that easy. ISO images are formatted with a different file system, than regular flash drives. Flash drives usually are FAT/FAT32, but can be formatted with various file systems, like NTFS, ext2/3 or others. Converting an ISO image to an IMG would mean to convert the CD/DVD specific file system to one of the earlier mentioned ones. At the moment I don’t know of a tool, that can perform this task.

  • Hi Universal USB installer 1.58.exe can convert ISO to USB
    was previously available on http://www.pendrivelinux.com but i cant see a compile download at the moment. (boo!)

    Up side is the above tool source code is available if you want to see how theirs works to add iso to your tool too (yay!) http://www.pendrivelinux.com/downloads/Sources/USB-Installers/

    Its Annoying limitation is usb pendrive needs to be at least 1gb as it wants to create at least a 700mb file system. (even if your iso is only 3mb 🙁 )

    Looking for a way to get around that 700mb issue in google actually found me your tool, but it wont do iso at all 🙁

    (I wanted to create a 3mb win98 bootdisk from image for a flash update so ye…)

  • Hi, it should restore the IMG to a external USB HDD too, because i have a linux.img +16gb and i don’t have a 16g pendrive but have a external HDD…

  • One addon to this prog shoud be nice. It`s sad that it copies empty sectors also. example: I`ve Windows 10 english iso installed to 16GB usb disk and when i take backup image with usb image tool it copies empty sectors also.. So image takes more harddisk space and now restore is also slower because those empty sectors need to be copied. Maybe setting for not copy empty sectors/empty space would be nice. Program would very best after that.. Thanks for good program Alex 🙂

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