Fenestrating the Handbook memstick section

Warren Block wblock at wonkity.com
Tue Jan 18 02:00:18 UTC 2011


Currently, the Handbook only shows how to create a FreeBSD install 
memstick by using dd(1).  This leaves the Windows crowd unaddressed.

I've done some searching for a Windows utility to write memory sticks 
that is freely available and simple to use.

There's a dd for Windows (http://www.chrysocome.net/dd), but it's 
difficult to use due to target names that are hard to associate with 
drive letters, and just plain complex.  For example, 
\\?\Device\Harddisk5\Partition0.

There's http://www.winimage.com/winimage.htm, which is general-purpose 
and shareware.

Finally, there's https://launchpad.net/win32-image-writer, which is 
Image Writer for Windows or win32diskimager depending on how you look. 
Done by the Ubuntu folks.  GPLV2.  Easy to use.  The best option I've 
found so far.

The questions:

Is there a better Windows utility for writing a memory stick image?

If we recommend Image Writer for Windows, seems like it would be polite 
to ask the project before taking advantage of their download capacity. 
Or would it be better to have a copy hosted on a FreeBSD server?



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