I have a Sandisk Cruzer pendrive/thumb drive.

I am in the briar patch of various instructions on how to get a
Sandisk Cruzer usb thumb drive bootable for use with HDD Raw copy tool.

Steps are:

1.) format the Cruzer

2.) make the Cruzer bootable as first device
(selected the Cruzer in the BIOS)

3.) install one of the versions of HDD Raw copy.

Please do not use any shorthand.

I have been confused and thwarted by various USB formatting routines such as the old HP and Linux tools.

This should be easier than all the dead ends I've found.

The goal is to get a bootable thumbdrive from which I can use a few clone tools.

My OS is WinXP

u can use rufus

Hi In my experience, sandisk cruzers don't make good bootable drives. Some work some don't. The best so far I have found is small Patriot Swing drives. 4GB about AU$5, I have 10 of them all working well.

Could part of the problem be that some bootable flash drives may be configured to look like "super floppies" rather than hard drives? The latter would have an MBR in sector 0 whereas the former would have a boot sector but no MBR.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

If you aren't stuck on RAW copy, I suggest booting with Linux and using ddrescue instead.

_________________
Luke
Recovery Force Donor Inventory: 5,000+ Fully Cataloged HDDs & Growing

You say you want to make a boot drive with a heap of utilities on there. Why not look for utils that do that, and maybe look at hirens boot CD and the other one I can never remember.. Bart PE or something. Also I remember seeing something like that on Hak5, maybe look through their old videos, they are up on iTunes I think.

HaQue


No, just the opposite. I want a simple pendrive that can load HDD Raw Copy only.

In the past I have installed the hirens through their instructions. But when you do that you are locked into its load sequence.

That program called Rufus did not cooperate very much. And when it showed completed the Cruzer booted again and looked like the same sequence went through with the usual menu.lst empty because I don't know how to edit it.

I'm satisfied the thing is formatted and is booting ok. There's just no content on it. Why is it not a matter of simply dragging and dropping a program onto the device? What do other people do when using such a device?

I'm trying to recall why I pulled the Cruzer from use in the first place but cannot remember.

With these pendrives as cheap and as common as prizes in Crackerjack boxes why would they not come preformatted as floppies used to do?

Well that's enough questions for today. To me it seems like a pound of effort for an ounce of function.

Other Linux based- progs like Clonezilla ISO I find to scary to use. I load them and they don't give clear indication of what they are about to do but just give a lot of warnings about how I am about to lose everything on the HD.

Ah, ok, I read this:

and interpreted it wrong.

IMHO, try a few different thumbdrives with some of the bootable usbs out there and you should be fine.

have you seen http://malthus.zapto.org/viewforum.php?f=89 has a lot of bootdisc resources listed

I'll look but like Hirens older dos based tools tend to be glitchy. I would like to be able to concentrate on MHDD and Raw Copy as being in development and open source and up to date.

My bad and I apologize. It was me who read 'install lots of programs' or whatever when I only wanted one ot tow-- like MHDD and Raw Copy tool.

I will look at malthus but like Hirens a lot of the old dos based tools have become glitchy due to lack of attention to development. That's why I wanted to get away from the Hirens suite.

And I am not going to mess with quoting things on here. I just blew off a whole message accidentally. This is the rewrite.