How to extract just the flash drive boot properties to copy them them to another

I wanted to make a bootable USB out of a 192 MB Norton Ghost bootable ISO. Here's how you do it: DOS > diskpart > list disk > select disk # of USB Flash drive > clean > create partition primary > select partition 1 > active > format fs=NTFS > assign > exit

Then you just simply copy the contents of the 192 ISO.


But I wanted to avoid all that and simply make an image of the 192 MB Bootable USB. The problem is, modern drive image software does not work with flash drives and when I use WinImage and similar, - the size of the USB Flash Drive image is the size of the Flash drive. 4GB drive = 4GB image. Even if there is only 192 MB in it.


So how can I create 192 MB USB Drive image?
Maybe if I just copied the boot properties from the USB Flash drive I know how to make? But how?

Wow. Key was to format the USB drive to NTFS first.

If you format to FAT, this does not work! So simply format the USB Flash drive to NTFS then get UNetbootin from http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ > Download (for Windows)


Start UNetbootin > Leave Distribution unselected > SELECT: ISO and browse to the ISO file >
SELECT the USB drive letter > OK > Exit


I would have never guessed the solution was to simply format USB drive to NTFS first. I am still interested in why all the programs create USB Flash images having the same sizes as the entire flash drives. Even if 1 MB is on them, the image files would be the size of the entire flash drive. This is not the case with hard drives, just USB flash drives.

Did you try Flashboot?

To do what? As far as simply "burning" a CD ISO to a flash drive and making it bootable and identical as if you burned a real CD... well the open source http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ accomplishes that just like the $38 Flashboot does.


As far as the other thing that interests me, Flashboot appears to behave the same as the freeware: I only worked with fixed hard drives before where if you have 1GB of data on a 100 GB fixed hard drive, then a drive image of that drive would be 1GB or less if compressed.

But if you have 192 MB of data on a 4GB USB Flash drive - then why is the image not 192 MB or less? Why is the USB Flash drive image always = to the size of the flash drive? So 192 MB USB Flash drive is stored in a 4GB image, or however large the entire USB Flash drive is, if it's 8GB then the image size is 8GB, what if I had a 64 GB Flash Drive - then what - 64 GB image no matter what I have on it?