I am having issues getting results on searches because I get a bunch of results for doing a many ISOs to one USB (like Ventoy). Though I do get some results for hardware devices that can clone one USB to one or more blank USBs. But those hardware devices sell for hundreds of dollars.

I have a periodic need to update around 17 bootable USB drives at work. The drives are burned from ISO files (PC repair tools) and need to be updated with updated versions of the ISO. Currently I have to start each one at a time and is annoying (not as bad as some sys admins out there needing to do hundreds of drives).

So I was wondering if anyone knows of FOSS (or even mostly FOSS) plans/instructions for making a one to many USB clone hardware device using RPi or similar (I have a RPi 5 and a Pico W atm)? If a purpose built hardware device isn't around. Are there any FOSS software programs for Windows (my only real option at work) that can handle taking one ISO to burn onto many USBs? I am fine with it doing them one at a time if they are all plugged-in automatically or if it can do small groups of like four or five.

Just seems like out of all the different guides/plans/kits for things like RPi or similar-ish boards. That there would be something like those pricey one to many cloning devices. Thanks in advance to everyone that can point me to anything useful!

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[–] solrize@lemmy.world 12 points 1 month ago

Get a USB hub (7 port is common), plug the USB drives in, then run a script that copies the iso to one drive after another. USB itself sucks enough that trying to do them in parallel is likely asking for trouble.

[–] hydrogen@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 month ago

Not on Windows, maybe WSL? Popsicle from System76

[–] tofubl@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I have done a similar thing in the past, but to flash firmware onto any device with a certain USB descriptor that gets plugged in. It was a mess of USB hubs and cables, but it worked.

What I did was write a udev rule that checks for the vendor and product id of a newly plugged in device and calls a script when there's a match. The script then performs the flashing and logs the output.

In your case:

dd the source USB to a file (make sure the partition you're dding is smalled than any target drive
Udev rule according to your needs (all the same product or different drives?)
Script that dds the file you created earlier back to the newly plugged in drive.

Edit. Did this on a rpi3

[–] perry@lemy.lol 4 points 1 month ago

Since you asked for windows, etcher can do multiple drives as of v1.4.3

https://blog.balena.io/etcher-now-with-multi-write-and-compute-module-support/

[–] vk6flab@lemmy.radio 3 points 1 month ago

If you use a raspberry pi for each USB device, you could use multicast to distribute the iso across the network once and have each pi write it to the USB drive connected locally.

I also had a quick look around and found this:

https://www.everyusb.com/how-do-you-copy-data-to-multiple-flash-drives-at-once

One other idea I came across was to setup the devices as a raid array and write to the raid device.

[–] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Does your windows machine have WSL? I would just write a bash script that would DD the image to the drives. Keep in mind that you will be severely bandwidth limited by the USB interface, so it will take a long time. All of the ports on the controller share the same bandwidth. Ideally you would build a PC with lots of USB controller cards for that.

[–] IrritableOcelot@beehaw.org 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Is that true? I thought that pairs of USB-A ports shared the same PCIe lanes, and USB-C each got their own set?

Edit: thinking about it a bit more, I suppose it could depend on how the SOC/chipset allocates those lanes, but in my experience when writing a single USB I'm usually limited by the thermals of the USB, and writing well below the speed of the port. I suppose if you were writing many at once (or if your USBs were nice) that could bottleneck on the port speed.