dos/standalone data recovery software that can access usb flash?

[poster]

fat hdd with bad mbr needs to backed up to flash but most of Hirens
recovery tools do not see flash at all, so any ideas wellcome.Booting
with Dr Dos boot cd enables usb flash access but is that going to
help the aforementioned apps, or app has to be written-programmed to
support usb drive?

 

[Harry]

fat hdd with bad mbr needs to backed up to flash but most of Hirens
recovery tools do not see flash at all, so any ideas wellcome.Booting
with Dr Dos boot cd enables usb flash access but is that  going to
help the aforementioned apps, or app has to be  written-programmed to
support usb drive?

UBCD4Win can see USB storage devices.
There are some free disk cloning utils in UBCD4Win.
Alternatively, you can build UBCD4Win with some commercial cloning
utils, such as Ghost, Acronis True Images, etc (provided that you have
those software and then finding corresponding plugins from the web).

Just google UBCD4Win.

 

[Arno]

fat hdd with bad mbr needs to backed up to flash but most of Hirens
recovery tools do not see flash at all, so any ideas wellcome.Booting
with Dr Dos boot cd enables usb flash access but is that going to
help the aforementioned apps, or app has to be written-programmed to
support usb drive?

Get a Knoppix CD and do it with Linux.

Opan a terminal and do a "sudo su" to become root.

Basic commands:

List all drives/partitions:
fdisk -l

Copy partition to file
dd_rescue <source partition> <target file>

Instructions for dd_rescue
man dd_rescue

Be careful not to give your HDD as target, or it will be overwritten.

Arno