Clone XP on USB to USB + some interesting stuff .

[PoBoy]

Overclockers.com - Cloning Windows XP installed on a USB flash drive to another USB flash drive

Note this page is not displaying properly as of now. Viewed the source.

1) clone Windows XP installed on a USB flash drive to another USB flash drive.

more interesting, ie something I did not know :

2) represent any removable drive as a fixed drive,

3) Using XPe Enhanced Write Filter to lock down and speed up USB flash drive

If you need to speed up the whole thing, there is a nice filter driver used on Windows XP Embedded platform. It is called Enhanced Write Filter (EWF) and is used on XP Embedded USB flash installations.

What it does is basically a lockdown of the partition and redirection of all I/O to RAM drive in memory, pretending that it’s writing to the drive preserving write/erase cycles for the USB flash drive. Since there is no physical writing on the drive, everything is lost if you restart or power off the machine. This is a very neat feature for the appliances that are supposed to be read-only. If you need to write down something (eg. configuration file) you can disable EWF to dump all the data to the drive, then enable EWF to lock down the partition again and then restart the computer.

More about this driver can be found on Microsoft pages:

Enhanced Write Filter

Haven't tried any of this myself.