How to restore a USB drive converted to bootable

[Dave]

On Friday 01 May 2015 17:20:10 William A. Mahaffey III wrote:
> I am about to do some OS installs (NetBSD & OpenBSD, as it happens) on 
> boxen under construction. I would also like to use UBCD on a flash drive 
> to memcheck those boxen prior to installation. If I prep a USB thumb 
> drive as either a bootable UBCD drive or an over-the-WWW installer, I 
> wipe out the drive for its original use. Is there a way to restore the 
> drive back to its original functionality if I wanted to ? I will 
> probably use this box, AMD64 FreeBSD 9.3R-p13, for the prepping, BTW, 
> just to bring it sorta on-topic  ....

one potentially heretical answer is to use yumi, available from pendrivelinux.com

It's a Windows program which puts syslinux on a FAT32 pendrive and allows you to boot multiple images/ISOs from a menu while retaining the "normal" usage of the pendrive.  The possible downside is you need a Windows computer to build and/or maintain it.

There is a Linux version in development too but I've not looked at that for a while.

Disclaimer.  I have no connection to Yumi or pendrivelinux.com.  Just a happy user for a number of years.