R4D DOCS

Recovery for Dummies documentation

Project maintained by NathanNeurotic Hosted on GitHub Pages — Theme by mattgraham

How to Write the R4D Disk Image to a USB Stick

Recovery for Dummies (R4D) (or R4D for short) is distributed as a disk image, not a disc image. Therefore, it must be written directly to a USB stick – it cannot simply be copied like a regular file.

The disk image already contains the required partition table, partition layout, and file system, so there is no need to format the USB stick beforehand. Whatever is currently stored on the USB stick will be overwritten during the writing process. All existing data on the selected USB stick will be permanently erased.

You can use any application capable of writing a disk image to a storage device sector by sector. This guide uses Rufus as an example because it is one of the most popular and easiest-to-use tools for this task (Linux users can use dd instead).

Step A. Write the Disk Image

Start Rufus and configure the following options:

  1. Device: Select the target USB stick from the list of detected devices. The minimum supported size is 1 GiB (because the disk image was created for this size), and the maximum supported size is 2 TiB (because the image uses an MBR partition table).
  2. Click the Select button and choose the R4D disk image.
  3. Click the Start button and wait until Rufus finishes writing the disk image.

Rufus configuration

Step B. Extend the Partition

As you have probably noticed, after writing the disk image, the USB stick capacity is reduced to 1 GiB. This is expected behavior.

If you want to use the remaining unallocated space on the USB stick, you can extend the partition. Unfortunately, this cannot be done using Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc) on Windows 8 or later, nor with Windows Explorer. Instead, use a third-party partition manager such as AOMEI Partition Assistant or GParted.


Berion
2026-07-31

➜ Go back to main page