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I have several bootable USB flash drives lying around - some of them have Linux distros on them and others are Windows recovery drives. The thing is that the number of flash drives for these purposes is getting out of hand. Especially with Windows, I like to have several versions of recovery disks even. So I wonder: is it possible to export the contents of these USB flash drives to (bootable) ISO files? And what steps do I have to take to do the reverse: i.e. import the ISO image and turn the drive into a bootable one?

Does anyone have any experience with this?

sandokanfirst
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1 Answers1

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  1. You can make an exact image of a USB drive with PassMark's ImageUSB, or export the USB as ISO using usbimager. Just use the same tool on the image on disk to transfer back to USB.

ImageUSB

  1. As you state, it's very useful to have a variety of rescue media, such as Live Ubuntu, Hiren's Boot CD, Macrium Reflect rescue media and Ultimate Boot CD, and the clutter of USB flash drives annoying, I've started to put the media on small, inexpensive µSD cards, and keep a few µSD readers handy. As an example, a 5-pack of 32-GB cards can be found for US$15 and a 5-pack of readers for US$6. The cards are too tiny to label fully, but I number them in white correction pen and label the storage box.

µSD Card Storage

DrMoishe Pippik
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