Rescue USB Flash Drives & Data Recovery

Most bootable Rescue USB Flash Drives that I have seen require the FAT32 file system. If you are recovering file(s) from a crippled PC using a bootable Rescue USB Flash Drive, is it a common and safe practice to recover (copy) the file(s) to the same bootable Rescue USB Flash Drive? It seems like it would be more convenient to just carry around one USB Flash Drive that can do both file recovery and recovered file storage.

I have essentially no practical experience with recovering file(s) from a crippled PC with a bootable Rescue USB Flash Drive. I know how to recover file(s) using either a bootable CD/DVD or a bootable USB Flash Drive. I have practiced this a few times on my Windows PC's, but I would always copy the test file(s) to a different USB Flash Drive.

A few examples of bootable USB Flash Drives that can be used for file recovery on a crippled PC: YUMI, Xboot, Kaspersky Rescue 10 USB, Dr.Web Live USB, etc. In YUMI and Xboot you can use many Linux Distros such as: Parted Magic, Puppy Linux, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, etc.

Thanks in Advance.

 

TheKid7,

I use a bootable USB HD instead of a flash drive. Flash drives are slow compared with HDs. Use a NTFS formatted external HD, install grub4DOS, add your ISOs. You can create and restore images to/from the external HD.

 

I was thinking USB Flash Drive for convenience and for the case of recovering a small amount of files.

I recently purchased a small medium speed 16 GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive. The specifications show 50 MB/sec Read & 20 MB/sec Write. On my USB 2.0 Windows XP Pro PC I got 31.1 MB/sec Read & 18.1 MB/sec Write for a single ~3.6 GB file. This speed is reasonably fast for recovering a modest amount of files.

I just ordered a two (2) Flash Drive carry case which can be attached to a belt loop or just put in my pocket.

 

Nice speeds. They make my flash drives look sick.

 

Today, I ordered two small 8 GB USB 2.0 Flash Drives (Model with Excellent User Feedback) for the new carry case. I could not find any Read/Write speed specifications for them. However, a purchaser said that the Write speed is ~7 MB/sec.

 

If you use bootloaders such as grub4dos to boot your ISO, IMG or other bootable files, you can format your USB Drive to NTFS