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Basically, I require different Live USBs for different needs. I have a single USB drive & when I need to switch to another distro/OS, I simply flash this USB drive with the right boot attributes, using Rufus.

I thought that since I keep on setting the proper boot attributes whenever I need to flash & considering I MIGHT set it wrong, that's my 10 mins of flashing, gone. So I thought I'd finalize things.

I thought whatever Rufus flashes to the USB drive, I might catch as a disk image & have it not just preserve the needed boot attributes, but also be as close of a binary copy. From then on, I'll be using another flasher that writes the disk image in a RAW manner, one that does not save any bootloaders files to the USB drive. With nothing to configure, how can I mess it up? Is the idea.

How do I set about to do this? First thing that comes to mind is using a virtual USB flash drive that is writable, so Rufus will write to a disk image. Though, I've yet to find a virtual USB flash drive software.

I'm also thinking of maybe burning the resulting disk image to CD/DVDs. Would that work?

EDIT:

Rufus has a choice of flashing a USB drive: enter image description here

Going on this path, I would need a virtual USB HDD.

kozner
  • 309

2 Answers2

11

Rufus can create an uncompressed VHD image from whichever drive you have currently selected, which, for all intent and purposes can be used as a regular DD image (because the only difference with a regular DD image is an extra 512-byte footer, which, no matter how much you may think otherwise, will NEVER EVER come in the way of using the .vhd as a .img).

UPDATE: And recent versions can also create compressed VHDX images, that take less space, and that can work the same way.

This is actually accessed by the little blue save icon that you see at the top of the screenshot you attached. Have you tried that?

From there, I believe that you should be able to achieve what you want, with the bonus that you'll also be able to mount the image you created as a virtual drive on Windows, if you want to alter it.

For more on this, please see the Rufus FAQ.

Akeo
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2

Solution 1: Read the image from a prepared flash drive. Win32DiskImager can be used to do this.

Solution 2: Prepare your own hybrid ISO. Most of modern Linux distros use so called hybrid ISOs. They are valid ISOs that can be burned to a CD/DVD, but at the same time they are valid disk images that can be written to a flash drive. For example you could feed an Ubuntu ISO to Win32DiskImager and have it write it to disk (Rufus may offer this feature for some ISOs, it calls it "dd mode"). Community documentation on ISO customization is ten to thirteen years old, but may still be useful and you'll find many useful guides all over the Internet.

gronostaj
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