It’s a USB Thing

I was working on a USB project recently and needed to capture an image of a USB device for restoration.

That got me reviewing my pile of USB tools and looking for updates. Found some and a bunch of new-to-me freeware USB tools.

Here you go.

USB Image Tool - alex’s coding playground - updated to v 1.58 with some nice fixes.

ImageUSB - Write an image to multiple USB Flash Drives - PassMark Software - great standalone tool to make/push images of USB flash drive devices. Hard to go wrong with this one!

USB Disk Ejector - Quick And Easy Software - This is a “cutsie” app but seems much easer to me to use than hunting in the system tray for the Windows USB device ejection method. Definitely makes it easier to identify the correct device when there are more than one connected and I’m rushing.

Dev Eject - Stop right now and add this one to your utility pile. Seriously. A co-worker has been having problems ejecting USB HDD devices from his XP system and turned to me to figure things out. He didn’t think he had any open calls to the device running and OpenedFilesView didn’t report any clues either. I turned to Dev Eject and immediately found the culprit: Symantec AV seemed to be doing a file-scan (slowly) when he was ejecting the device. More info in this AddictiveTips post: Identify Processes Hindering Removable Media Ejection With Dev Eject.

Use command line to safely remove USB drives by Mike Williams at BetaNews has a lot of clever tips.

Want lots of freeware USB tools? Serious, low level USB tools? CLI USB tools (and then some)?

Uwe Sieber’s got you covered! Drive Tools for Windows

• RemoveDrive V2.2 - Safe removal of drives
• RestartSrDev - restarts "Safely Removed" devices which have the "Code 21" problem code
• EjectMedia V2.2 - ejects a media from a drive
• ReMount - reassigning mounpoints (change drive letters)
• ListDosDevices
• USB-WriteCache V0.1
• USB Drive Letter Manager - USBDLM (Note: USBDLM is Freeware for private and educational (schools, colleges, universities) use only.)

HotSwap! - Kazuyuki Nakayama - gives more friendly interface than the “Safely Remove Hardware” icon in the system tray does.

USBLogView - NirSoft tool to record all USB devices plugged into a system and logs to a file.

USBDeview v2.00 - NirSoft tool to list all USB devices plugged into a system as well as all USB devices previously used (with details).

RMPrepUSB - Tool to partition and format USB drive and make it bootable. Free for private use only. If you know what you are doing, this tool isn’t needed but it goes a long way to helping noobies and the author has a large number of tutorials as well. More here: RMPrepUSB – Amazing USB Formatting Tool! - post from AgniPulse,RMPrepUSB : Install Windows on USB, Speed up USB and do more with it via The Windows Club and RMPrepUSB: Create Bootable Windows/Linux USB, Test R/W Speed & More post via AddictiveTips.

How To Create Customizable Multiboot System Rescue Disk - AddictiveTips post on using SARDU builder to make a multiboot USB tool.

Cheers.

--Claus V.