Diskgenius Create Iso

[Nichele Seibel]

Youshould decide partition type before creating new partition table. There are three types of partitions on an MBR disk, i.e. primary partition, extended partition and logical partition. Primary partition is created on hard drive directly, which is generally used to install and boot operating system. Due to the limitation on MBR partition table, there can be 4 primary partitions at most, or 3 primary partitions and 1 extended partition. Extended partition is a kind of special primary partition, and it can contain several logical partitions. Logical partition is created on extended partition, and the number of logical partition is not limited. A GPT disk does not have such limitations

The newly created partition is not saved to hard drive immediately, as it is created in memory for the moment. Thus, you need to save the partition to partition table manually before you can see it in Windows Explorer. Such approach is to prevent data loss caused by improper operation.

This function creates a backup for an entire disk by creating a compressed file for the disk, and all partitions and files on the disk will be contained within the compressed file which is saved as an image file with .pmfx extension. DiskGenius supports three modes to image a disk.

All Sectors: Back up all sectors of the source disk to the image file in sequence from beginning to end, without checking whether these sectors contain valid data. This disk imaging method will copy a large amount of invalid data and take longer time, and yet it is the most complete method. When restoring the image, the target disk should not be smaller than the source disk.

Data Sectors Only: Valid data is backed up to the image file "as it" according to the file system layout of each partition on the source disk. The disk imaging process only backs up sectors containing valid data and it is the fastest way. When restoring the image, the target disk should not be smaller than the source disk.

All Files: Backup all files and other valid data of the source disk one by one into the image file. This method does not backup sectors that contain invalid data, so it is quite fast. The disk image can be restored to a smaller disk which is large enough to receive the data to be restored. The storage location of restored files will be rearranged, and the newly restored disk will be free of file fragmentation.

The disk image can be created with various compression levels, from Fast, Normal to High Quality. Data compression option affects disk imaging speed and the size of the image file. The higher compression quality you choose, the slower the disk imaging speed will be, but the smaller the image file will be.

"Hot Migration" or "Hot Backup" will image the disk without stopping or restarting Windows OS. "Lock & Execute" means the source disk will be locked temporarily during the disk imaging, and other programs cannot access the disk.

DiskGenius is capable of creating USB bootable disk and USB-FDD, USB-ZIP and USB-HDD boot methods are supported. This function can converse USB flash disk (or USB hard drive) into FDD or ZIP mode and build bootable DOS system, which can be used to boot computer. For computers supporting USB boot, such boot disk can be used when restoring system. Nowadays, motherboard manufacturers have no agreed standards to USB boot mode; FDD, ZIP, HDD are the popular modes today. You can choose one according to the mode motherboard supports.

The HDD mode is the regular hard drive boot mode. When you start a computer, it loads hard drive master boot program which looks for active partition; and the control right is transferred to operating system of the active partition. Normally, the conversion is not necessary, and what you should do is to create a partition and format it on which you create a DOS system. If the current disk is working in FDD or ZIP mode, this function can convert it to HDD mode. Detailed steps are in the following:

Click No and DiskGenius won't create a partition after conversion, and you can use the disk normally; if you choose Yes, and "Create New Partition" dialog box pops up.

Click "OK" after selecting file system type and partition size, and DiskGenius will create a new partition immediately and copy DOS system to the newly created partition. The conversion of HDD mode is done!

You can create a disk image that includes the data and free space on a physical disk or connected device, such as a USB device. For example, if a USB device or volume is 80GB with 10GB of data, the disk image will be 80GB in size and include data and free space. You can then restore that disk image to another volume.

I had installed Ubuntu onto a USB drive, and configured that installation in various ways. I wanted to save that installation in a compressed ISO file that I could use as backup, and when needed could burn onto other USB drives, either single-boot (via e.g., Rufus or Balena Etcher) or multiboot (via e.g., YUMI).

This post reviews several Windows tools that seemed to have the potential to convert an existing USB drive to create that compressed ISO file. Another post reviews Ubuntu tools for that same purpose. It appeared the Ubuntu tools were likely to be more useful. (A different post explores Windows tools for converting Windows USBs to Windows ISOs.)

As such, this post adds to the explorations found in an earlier post and in posts linked in it, including the most recent update. Within a focus on converting Linux (especially Ubuntu) virtual machines (VMs) to physical installations, those posts looked at Ubuntu software that seemed to offer ISO-creation capabilities. The results were not particularly encouraging. It was possible that I overlooked solutions of merit, though those seemed to be relatively thorough explorations. Various websites (e.g., Ask Ubuntu 1 2 3) had explored possible methods and difficulties in the bootable USB-to-ISO process.

The central conclusion, from the following paragraphs, was that PowerISO, DiskGenius, and other Windows 10 programs could convert the contents of an Ubuntu USB drive into an ISO file, but that ISO would have important limits. Specifically, those programs captured those contents in raw form. That is, they copied everything on the source USB drive, byte for byte, without attempting to make sense of it. The result was an ISO as large as the drive itself.

My question was about the other half of that process. Could PowerISO, running in Windows, convert the contents of a USB drive, bootable in Ubuntu, into an ISO that could then be used to create another Ubuntu-bootable USB drive?

So I went ahead with the IMG option. To my surprise, the trial version copied the entire 25GB contents of the 64GB USB drive into its IMG file. That is, there did not presently seem to be any size restrictions on that particular operation.

These results suggested that, ideally, I would find a way to produce an ISO whose size would be somewhat similar to the 25GB of actual contents. The primary issue here was compatibility, not storage space. For the latter, I found that moderately aggressive settings in WinRAR (e.g., Normal compression, 1GB dictionary, 5% recovery record) saved the 60GB ISO into a suitably named file (e.g., Bootable USB.iso.rar) of only 13GB, though it took an hour to do so on a moderately strong Intel Core i5-13500 CPU.

In short, for my purposes, two things were missing from the PowerISO approach. First, I wanted a compressed ISO capturing the contents of the USB drive in no more space than necessary; and second, through that compression or otherwise, I wanted an ISO that YUMI could handle, so as to put this USB drive into a form that I could add to other tools on a multiboot USB drive.

I had only recently discovered DiskGenius. Possibly it was still emerging: it did not yet seem to have its own Wikipedia page. Another post describes my use of DiskGenius to create a Windows To Go bootable USB drive.

No software can match DiskGenius as it provides so many partition management functions and at the same time it offers professional data recovery feature. In this article, all operations on hard drive and partition are completed by DiskGenius.

As in the picture above, there are two hard drives on my virtual machine, and one hard drive has only one partition and large free space. If you want to create new partition from free space, you can right click the area and select item "Create New Partition".

On account that the partition table of the hard drive is MBR, so have we need to set the partition as primary partition or extended partition. Besides, we need to select file system format for the new partition and we usually choose NTFS for partitions on internal hard drive. Next, partition size can be modified to any size, but usually new partition includes all free space by default.

If the hard drive is GPT then there is no need to set primary partition or extended partition. If the partition is created on extended partition, then you have only one option, i.e. logical partition.

The last option relates to the concept "4K sector alignment", and you can check the box before the option and set the value as 8 sector or any item larger than 8 sector, after which the partition will be aligned to 4K sectors.

You can click "OK" after finishing all these settings. Since the operation of creating new partition modifies partition table, so the button "Save All" on the main menu is available for clicking, as follows:

If you change mind and don't want to create the partition for the moment, then you can discard the previous operations by reloading current hard drive: right click the model number that represents the hard drive and select the item "Reload Current Hard Disk".

I have been developing with the invaluable help from this community. I am currently using OpenWrt's ImageBuilder to create a custom image for the x86 architecture. The generated image, generic-ext4-combined-efi.img.gz, is installed on my nvme0n1, which has a capacity of 256GB.

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