Copying Data to Multiple USB Drives in Parallel

Overview

When selling Windows XP thin clients on eBay, I need to prepare multiple USB flash drives with software. Instead of doing them one at a time, I use a 7-port powered USB hub with individual port switches and Unix terminal commands to image up to seven drives simultaneously. This behind-the-scenes look shows the real workflow of preparing retro computers for sale, including the mistakes and troubleshooting that happen along the way. It’s not glamorous, but it’s efficient and practical.

Key Moments

• Using a 7-port aluminum USB hub with individual port power switches
• Opening multiple terminal tabs to work on drives in parallel
• Using Unix commands to navigate and copy files to each volume
• Troubleshooting connection issues by power-cycling ports individually
• The reality of one-handed filming while working on actual projects
• Copying pre-configured Windows XP and DOS software to all drives simultaneously

Full Transcript (Edited)

Hey there everybody, so in this video I’m going to show you quickly how you can image a bunch of USB drives at a time. I’ll show you how I do it so that you can get some ideas for your own projects.

So I sell these computers online, thin clients, and I install these tiny little USB flash drives and set them up with some software that I’ve already set up for one. So I took the time to set up one properly and then I copied the contents of this flash drive onto a zip file on my computer here.

What I did is I looked for a way to connect many of these flash drives at a time in an easy way. So I found this on Amazon. It’s a great little hub which has ports that can be powered on and off. So as you can see here, I plugged that one in and that one is now being connected to the computer.

So I’m going to go ahead and fill this up with a bunch of drives here and then I’ll show you how I use the terminal here to set them up.

[After plugging in drives]

Okay, so as you can see here I’ve installed a bunch of these flash drives. By the way, if you want to get this one from Amazon, I have links in the description so you can go straight to see this one or related items and you can buy one. They’re fairly cheap. And if you’re doing this kind of work or plugging in USB devices in and out, I also use this. I also put a link to this one which allows me to work with IDE, SATA and other drives. I’ll show you how that one works in another video.

But yeah, now that I’m going back to this. Now that I’ve set up all these flash disks here, you can see here that they’re all being detected as “SanDisk Cruiser.” And what I’m going to do now is I’m going to show you in the terminal here: if you go to /volumes, you’ll see that they’ll show up as “no name,” “no name 1,” “no name 2,” “no name 3,” “no name 4,” “no name 5.” So there’s six being detected and there are one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Huh, one of them is not showing up.

So one, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. So let me turn these off one by one and see what happened there.

[Troubleshooting]

So now I go up here and there’s nothing. So I’m gonna go in one by one, let them show up. All right, that one works. That one works. Okay, one by one we’re seeing them pop up. Okay, so now we’re up to four and we should see five. Okay, we’re up to five and six. Now the last one.

Okay, so now we have them all there. I’m not sure what happened there before, but now we have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. And here we have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. All right.

So now I’m gonna go into one of these and you see the contents of the drive there. And I will look at my history here to get a command that I normally use here. So it’s this one right here that I use. You notice that I have the contents that I’m going to put into the flash drive for the Windows XP computer that I’m using in this zip file.

So if I go “!512”… hopefully you’re also learning some Unix commands. So this means that I can run the command from my history, 512, which is that one. Make sure that I’m inside the drive that I want to write to. And then I’m going to say “yes, override everything.” And now it’s gonna start writing. As you can see there, it’s writing.

And what I do is now I go, I can go to a next tab and then go to volumes. Oh come on, it’s hard to type with just one hand, with my left hand. Nevertheless, I’m trying to create these short videos in a very unprofessional way just because I wanna show you things that I do along the way in the house without having to be all putting up professional videos. I can do those if you can see my previous ones that are a little bit more professional, but this is real life. This is what you actually have to do sometimes behind the scenes to set things up. And you tend to only see the flashier results on YouTube. So I’m showing you almost like behind the scenes.

All right, so going back to history here. And here I don’t see it. So “!186.” I can do a “!186” here and again it’ll do that. And as you can see here, I will open tabs for each one of these, and I can go ahead and set up one at a time. Well, all of them in parallel. And by the time I get to this one over here with another tab, this one will be done.

So this is one quick way to set up a bunch of flash drives. I also use DD for imaging, so you can actually use… you can create an image of the disk and then write the image back. But for my purpose here, I just wanted… Windows and DOS machines, they tend to be really, really flexible with keeping everything in as long as you have the files stored in the path. As you can see here, this is Warcraft 3 and I’m writing that to a directory called “Program Files.” So I just copy everything to the drive, plug it into my Windows XP computer and it works.

And yeah, hopefully that was helpful. Like I said, I’m gonna put links to this and some other tools that I use on Amazon in the description to this video so you can go ahead and give it a shot and add some products to your workbench that might be useful.

All right, so let me know what you think in the comments. If you like this, subscribe. You know, it really helps. I’m trying to get to a thousand subscribers so that I can start monetizing on YouTube because I’d like to grow this channel and be able to get some of that money from the ad revenue and start to be able to afford better videos, better editing, stuff like that. Because I do have a full-time job, so this is kind of for fun right now.

So yeah, let me know what you think, please. Until next time.