How to Image a USB Drive

[tos1150]

Hello, I installed Ubuntu 10.10 on an 8G USB thumb drive. I spent an hour or so getting updates and tweaking the desktop the way I like it. Is there a way I could take an image of the USB thumb drive ? BTW, the Dell has a failed SSD so I'm booting up Ubuntu with just the USB drive. There is something I tried but it didn't work out:

I placed the USB in a desktop PC running Ubuntu and used dd to copy the contents of the USB drive to a file. Like this: sudo dd if=/dev/sdb of=/home/ubuntu/minidump/backup

Then I placed a different empty 8G USB in that same pc and reversed the process. When I placed the new USB drive back in the Dell mini, I got the "grub rescue" prompt. So that didn't work for some reason. I'm trying to image what's on the original USB so I can run it on other Dell Mini's without taking the time to install Ubuntu 10.10 each time. Anyone do this before ?

RDL

[tos1150]

Ok, I was able to copy my original USB drive successfully. I think the problem was I didn't make sure I had the drive unmounted. I got a good copy of the USB this way:

sudo dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sdc bs=1k

sdb is my original USB drive, sdc is the blank one. After doing this, I placed sdc in my Dell Mini and it booted up ok.

RDL