There are many tools available on the internet that allow you to create the disk images for the CD/DVD disks. For example, you can use the ImgBurn tool for creating ISO disk images for optical disks. Similarly, if you want to create the disk images for the USB mass storage devices (like USB keys, MP3 players etc.), then you can use the free USB Image Tool.
USB Image Tool can create images of USB flash drives and MP3 players, that are mounted as USB drives. It supports all devices that Windows recognizes as mass storage media. You can use it to clone the contents of one USB key to another or just for creating the backup of your MPP3 player.
You can download USB Image Tool from its author’s website. The download is available in a zipped archive. Although you do not need to install USB Image Tool, you still need Microsoft .NET framework installed on your PC for it to work. After extracting the contents of the Zip archived, you can run USB Image Tool.exe to launch the application.
Working with USB Image Tool is very easy. To create the backup (disk image) of a USB key, select it from the left side list. Then click on the Backup button on the bottom. It would ask you to choose a target IMG file. After this it would start to create the disk image for that USB device.
Similarly, if you want to store the contents of a USB Disk from its image, then select the target USB device, click on the Restore button, select the IMG file and it would start to copy files to the target USB storage device.
Clicking on the Reset button can delete all the contents of the selected USB device and format it. This option is useful if you want to quickly empty a USB mass storage device and format it.
In the options, you can choose to display non-removable USB devices like USB hard disks, create MD5 hashes for the output IMG files, supply a buffer size, show completion message and so on. All these settings can be saved to the Windows registry.
USB Image Tool works with any device, that implements the USB Mass Storage protocol. This includes flash drives, card readers and a lot of other devices, like digicams, cell phones and mobile phone music players. It can be used to create and restore the full backups of these devices as well as create a image file for the USB storage devices.
You can download USB Image Tool from http://www.alexpage.de/usb-image-tool/ .