How to create a virtual USB memory stick clone?

[Nuvo]

I want to create an image file of USB memory stick and mount it as a virtual device that can be written to.

Creating virtual disk snapshot images of CD/DVD/HDDs is relatively easy, I can't find seem to find a suitable tool that supports USB stick emulation.

I'm looking for a tool that will run on Windows x86 that is small, portable and freeware if at all possible.

Can anyone help with this please?

Thanks in advance.

[irishs2]

Have you tried Winimage

http://www.winimage.com/

[Nuvo]

Hi Eric,
Searching through the program user docs only only made reference to the ability to create a self-extracting file that can be extracted to a removable drive, by resizing image. You can extract a self extracting bootable floppy to USB key with this feature. Unless I am mistaken, it doesn't appear to support the features I'm looking for.

[Sonic]

Does it matter whether it's a virtual cd/dvd/usb drive? Providing you can mount an iso or whatever you've imaged it as then i wouldn't have thought so.

I always used MagicDisc - http://www.magiciso.com/tutorials/mi...c-overview.htm

ETA this looks like it might be fairly lightweight and allow you writable images - http://www.freewaregenius.com/mount-...with-osfmount/

[irishs2]

It can make a vhd (virtual hd image) which can then be mounted by Disk Management

[Nuvo]

@Sonic
Yes, that would normally be enough.
But in this particular case the software I am using will only display physical USB HDDs and memory sticks in the drop down menu. I tried cloning the stick as a virtual HDD but the software doesn't detect it.

@irishs2
I'll have a closer look at that and report back.

edit: I created a .vhd clone using WinImage but for some inexplicable reason reports a file read error when I tried to open the file. I was able to mount it using ImDisk.

Rufus (the software I am wrestling with) still fails to detect* the VHD.

*Note that I have the "List USB Hard Drives" option checked.

[Nuvo]

Well I found that the problem wasn't with any of the numerous .vhd creation and mounting tools I tried but with the creaky operating system.

I was trying to get this to work on a legacy XP system and I'd either see unspecified parameter errors when creating a vhd container or the OS would erroneously report that it was unformatted.

Formatting it didn't help as Rufus still failed to detect the virtual device.
I thought this to be very strange behaviour indeed, my initial guess would be the vhd file specification has maybe changed since XP doesn't fully support these particular files. Pure speculation on my part.

That said, I would have thought at least one of the third party tools I tried would have nailed this.

The current workaround was to create and mount a vhd file in Windows 7, from there Rufus could detect the drive and I could complete the task in hand.

XP fails to properly mount the vhd I created using Rufus on a Win 7 system. Joy.

I hope to find a better solution to this, I'll report back if I ever find one.

[Nuvo]

I said that I would report back with an update. So here it is, the solution to this was twofold.

1.) Find a tool that can mount disks *not* drive volumes so that the boot sector and
partition tables are accessible.
Mounting a volume only gives access to file and directory stuctures which isn't
enough for this task.

I performed an unattended installation of the VHDMount tool from the Microsoft
Virtual Server 2005 R2 setup file.
This lets me mount and unmount vhd disks as needed. I also added a registry
hack to conviently mount and dismount vhd's using a context menu instead of
typing commands into the CLI.

2.) I contacted that developer of Rufus about it not detecting virtual devices and he kindly added additional device driver support including Virtual Server into an Alpha release for me.

I can now use a mounted vhd file as if it were a usb memory stick.

[irishs2]

Very cool.

[Greg_S]

I always use to use Daemon Tools on windows for mounting images, not sure if that will do quite what you need though

[Nuvo]

Daemon Tools is for optical media emulation isn't it? Well it was the last time I used it at any rate, which was some time ago.

So it now supports VHDs too?

edit: Just had a look on the Daemon Tools site read that Daemon Tools Ultra supports VHDs and has many other interesting new features.

I'll have a play with a trial copy to see how it performs. Thanks.