This corrupts my USB stick every time.

I don't believe that ImageWriter is doing anything to corrupt the stick. The image that is being written contains the partition info. All ImageWriter does is write that image to the device. ImageWriter does NO partitioning of the device.

Hi Harry,
I cannot say if I have the same problem as you. My purpose is similar to yours: try out Chrome OS. And of course I can't get though I tried the advised way, with two different USB sticks, three different PC's, and two kinds of Chrome OS: vanilla and lime (found here: http://chromeos.hexxeh.net/index.php). When I burn the stick with win32-image-writer 0.5 or 0.4 (file: Win32DiskImager.exe), process goes well. First surprise, the USB is not readable under Windows and more annoyingly, it does not boot. Good thing, under Vista/7/8 I can reclaim my lost storage and reformat the USB key after using the 'diskpart' command line utility (select/clean/create partition primary).
This is strange as press articles pretend this new Chrome version can be tested so. I didn't find any forum discussing this issue and it's hard to tell whether the snag sits within the IMG file you get or with the way it is burned. And we lack alternative sources to play with on either side.
So if any of you who read this have experience or know of such discussion forums, let us know. We want to see what Chromium looks like!
Cheers, Gerard.

I am having the same problem. Running windows 7 64bit 8 gbs ram. The weird thing is that the first time I used it, it worked fine however I had reformatted my usb to try some other distros but was unable to successfully use image writer again because it corrupts the usb every time (even on the distro I originally tested that worked).

So I'm wondering if image writer writes to the windows partition at all and not just the usb drive? Perhaps it writes some config files to the windows system or something and those are corrupt now.

Also I am a java programmer testing out different distros in order to have a pre-packaged development environment ready to go on a usb drive. I am using sysbench to run my benchmarks. When image writer worked the first time and I booted up on the usb drive with linux mint, the results were the best I have seen. Compared to running sysbench on windows and on virtualbox against mint and debian. Also I installed mint on my usb drive using Universal USB Installer (which installed fine) but after booting up with it and running sysbench, the results were only comparable to running on virtualbox. So I'm wondering if there is anything about your program that would make running an OS off a USB drive installed by image writer more efficient then an OS installed by another USB image installer? I would think that it shouldn't matter because the OS should be loaded into RAM on startup. With that said, using Universal USB installer did install about 2 more gigs on my usb drive then image writer, so maybe that's why.

Same here. Chrome OS didn't boot and my 16GB USB stick is now only 1GB... :/ Now I'm trying to fix this with "HP USB Disc Storage Format Tool v2.2.3". If it fails I will need to install linux on my HDD and try the Gparted trick :)

Win7 Ultimate 32bit.
EMTEC 16GB USB stick.
"Image Writer for Windows" v 0.7
ChromeOS-Vanilla-3749.0.2013_02_23_1631-r3a235e14