Every now and then I stumble across a piece of software that is well written, extremely useful and FREE. Today I’m going to talk about Image USB
During the day I am responsible for a staff of help desk technicians that are continuously upgrading and repairing PC’s. They like to have their Windows 10 install media on a bootable USB drive. Lately the industry is shying away for optical disk drives, so bootable USB install media is a must.
Why can’t I just copy the files from one drive to another?
To “BOOT” from USB media the disk needs to have a boot sector. Think of the boot sector as a hidden area on the drive that the gives the computer specific instructions that it can only see at startup. Once the operating system is running you can easily copy your files from one drive to the other, however the hidden boot information is a little more difficult
What is special about ImageUSB?
I really like this software because its lightweight, runs on all modern versions of Windows and its FREE. Plus the best part is you can write image files concurrently to multiple USB drives. You are only limited by the number of USB ports on the workstation.
The software is easy to use, start off by taking your existing bootable USB drive and making an image file out of it. A .bin file will be saved to your hard drive. (You can skip this step if a bootable img, iso or bin file already exists.)
Next load up as many USB drives as you need replicas of and fire away. Depending on the speed of your computer and the size of the drive it will take several minutes for the clone to complete. The software will even do a post image verification to make sure the drive is an exact duplicate.
Other good uses for this software.
- Passing out marketing materials on company branded drives
- Distributing files to employees or vendors.
- Duplicating your latest audio track to send to the record lables
Think of it as the CD/DVD copier of the 90’s and 00’s