The ThinState USB disk is split into 2 partitions. And the second partition isn’t accessible in Windows so it was very hard to build a stick from scratch. There are a lot of Windows USB clone tools but because I had to clone the ThinState 16GB to a 8GB stick also, it was impossible to do it from my windows workstation. But when some things get more difficulty what do you do? Use Linux 🙂
The Easy way (same USB stick size or bigger):
$sudo dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sdc bs=512
The “Hard” way (clone to smaller USB):
First resize the partitions with gparted to the minimum size. Then find out the last sector of the /dev/sdb2 (where sdb2 is my USB stick)
$sudo fdisk -u -l /dev/sdb
Output:
Disk /dev/sdb: 14,9 GiB, 16026435584 bytes, 31301632 sectors Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disklabel type: dos Disk identifier: 0x6a60ab98 Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type /dev/sdb1 * 2048 2099199 2097152 1G b W95 FAT32 /dev/sdb2 2099200 14131199 12032000 5,8G 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
Now use dd with sector 12032000 + 1.
dd if=/dev/sdb of=/home/myusername/usbimage.img count=12032001
and write the *.img file back to your new USB stick:
dd if=/home/myusername/usbimage.img of=/dev/sdb