Nicolas,
As it turns out these boxes are Red Hat Enterprise Linux and not Windows!. I am not sure how the person who asked me to do the work does not know what he had! I guess he was the CEO though!
So I think this process becomes simpler.
I should just be able to insert the live cd and do a cp -r on / to the destination USB drive, correct?
cp -a is better
'man cp'
-a Same as -pPR options. Preserves structure and attributes of files but not directory structure.
Nice, thank you, I did not think about this option.
Best, ML