I purchased a USB flash drive with Kubuntu 8.04 , and it boots great.

Since there are no copyrights applicable (I assume), I would like to replicate an image of this flash drive.

In short, I hope to copy this bootable flash drive. Almost certainly the duplicated flash drive must be an image of the first assuming that the system goes to a particular place to get the initial boot info.

How is the data organized on the flash drive and how do I image it?



Thanks!

You are correct that you can copy and give away as many copies of Kubuntu as you like.

I like to use the partimage utility to make an image of a disk partition. Partimage automatically includes the master boot record in its archive file. Also, partimage does not copy the empty space on the partition so the archive file only contains data.

Easy way to create a mirror on another flash drive of IDENTICAL size is by using dd. You can either first dd to your hard drive, making an image file, or do it directly.
This is the way I would have done it:
dd if=/dev/uba of=/dev/ubb
Where "if" means input file and "of" means output file. This takes care of the boot record as well because the above copies every byte on the the drive.
I believe this will work with going from smaller drive to bigger, but to go from bigger to smaller you will need to first reduce the size of partition on the source drive to be same or smaller than the target drive.
Good luck.