Problems creating bootable USB flash drive with T6X42019 HP ThinPro Image for Thin Clients

A month ago or so I noticed that HP has released a new ThinPro Image for their t5745 thin clients and because I was having issues with bi-directional audio in VMware View, I was anxious to test the new image out.  As much as the operation of creating a bootable USB flash drive with this image should have been easy, I had a tough time because of the USB flash drive I was using.  Since it wasn’t obvious that the issue was with the flash drive, I thought it would be a good idea to blog this in case anyone searching on the internet as I did. 

The image I downloaded was the following version:

T6X42019 Rev. 1
12 Dec 2012

… and could be found at the following link:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareIndex.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodNameId=4071477&prodTypeId=12454&prodSeriesId=3996169&swLang=13&taskId=135&swEnvOID=4030

The file name for the image utility is: sp60181-usbkey-t6x42019.exe

The initial USB flash drive I used was my new Patriot Rage XT 64-bit:

Running the executable will begin extracting the files:

The following HP Thin Client Disk Imaging Tool would be presented:

Clicking on the USB Format button is supposed to format the USB flash drive and copy the ThinPro files onto it creating a bootable USB:

What I noticed is that the following Formatting window pops up for a split second then disappears:

You are then brought back to this window:

Attempting to browse the USB stick will prompt you to format the USB flash drive:

From here, I tried to click on the Image button: 

Which then opens up the following window:

Clicking on the drive will prompt you to format the USB drive:

After the formatting is complete, you will then be able open the USB flash drive:

Click on the Open button will extract the files:

Browsing the USB flash drive will show the following file:

T6X42019.dd.gz

This USB stick is not bootable.

After having no luck when trying to Google this issue to see if anyone else has experienced this issue, I went ahead and grabbed one of my older 16GB USB flash drives:

What I immediately noticed was that when I hit the Format button, progress was shown this time:

Once the format operation finished, the USB flash drive now had a Thinstate label:

While the drive had files:

I was then able to boot a HP t5745 thin client with this USB flash drive and image it with the latest ThinPro operating system.

I hope this helps anyone out there who may experience the same issue as I because it was definitely a frustrating 30 minutes when I was trying to figure out why the utility didn’t place the files I expected on the USB flash drive and nothing was out there when I tried to Google the issue.