That is, they copied everything on the source USB drive, byte for byte, without attempting to make sense of it. Specifically, those programs captured those contents in raw form. 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.

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 results were not particularly encouraging. 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. ( A different post explores Windows tools for converting Windows USBs to Windows ISOs.)Īs such, this post adds to the explorations found in an earlier post and in posts linked in it, including the most recent update. It appeared the Ubuntu tools were likely to be more useful.

Another post reviews Ubuntu tools for that same purpose. This post reviews several Windows tools that seemed to have the potential to convert an existing USB drive to create that compressed ISO file. 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). I had installed Ubuntu onto a USB drive, and configured that installation in various ways.

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