Trying to make a bootable Hirens SD card, recently proved to be a pain in the neck. But I finally found a program that works with virtually all of the Hirens versions I tested (version 9.x through 15.x). I had tried a bunch of methods and software, include a program called WinSetupFromUSB. WinSetupFromUSB had worked well, for me, with Windows operating systems and to create an Acronis, bootable, recovery SD card. But, at first, I got nowhere with WinSetupFromUSB (as I’ve said, nor with any other software). About to give up, I decided to revisit WinSetupFromUSB. It has a lot of options which, frankly, I don’t completely understand. After some tinkering – boom – I found some settings which worked flawlessly.
Making an image of your SD card
There are tons of high-end and low-end pieces of software that will help you image a drive. Again, this was a case where absolutely nothing worked except a program called Win32DiskImager-0.9.5. It’s a simple program that makes a sector by sector copy – in other words, if your card is 8 gig, your image will be 8 gig.
NOTE: This thing is simple, and, buggy to a minor extent. To make an image file of your SD card (thumb drive – whatever) choose the “Read” function. This will create an image file which should have the .img extension. However I’ve used it a couple of times and it created a perfectly good file, but, the written file was missing the “.img” suffix. You can simply append this to the file. Also, on XP the written files were saved to the users “Downloads” folder (a sub-directory of My Documents). On newer operating systems, they might be saved elsewhere. I have no idea and there is no documentation, that I have found, for this program……
AND: this thing makes a byte-by-byte copy 9as already noted) which is large – the same size as your drive…..and it’s slow. But, it is quite reliable. It’s fine for an SD card or a small thumb drive…..that’s about it.