Hi
Suppose I have 16 different devices to image back to the original shipping condition and only one USB3 hard drive. For each make and model of laptop/desktop I have one unit still in the factory condition so I can run the builtin recovery media generation tool.
Some of them spit out ISOs which I can work with, but others generate a bootable pen drive - for example a Dell M4700 laptop using the Dell Recovery Manager tool can create a bootable pen drive with the folder structure is as follows:
Root directory:
02/11/2006 07:53 438,840 bootmgr
24/03/2014 09:22 206 ResSys.ini
\boot:
18/09/2006 19:26 262,144 bcd
18/09/2006 19:45 3,170,304 boot.sdi
18/09/2006 19:27 1,024 bootfix.bin
18/09/2006 19:27 2,048 etfsboot.com
\boot\fonts contains 5 Truetype fonts.
\Dell:
24/03/2014 09:22 3,170,304 boot.sdi
27/05/2009 19:40 8,591,509 WBF.wim
\Dell\Image:
24/03/2014 09:22 63 catalog.ini
24/03/2014 09:33 7,985,412,918 Factory.wim
\sources:
24/03/2014 09:22 201,016,417 boot.wim
But this particular recovery image is tailored for only a few variations of Dell Precision laptops. So I need another pen drive for a Compaq CQ56. And another pen drive for a HP Elitebook. And another one for a Sony Vaio. And so on.
RMPREPUSB has a "drivetofile" option and it got me thinking...
Is that drive backup mountable and bootable, and if it is then what's the procedure to convert a physical pen drive into a bootable image on the larger HDD with a menu option in the boot loader?
And if that isn't possible, what's the simplest alternative?
Cheers