Ghost 8.2, booted from UBCD4Win, sees my Kingston 1GB USB key (from last week's VMWORLD conference) and clones it, using the -ID parameter (image disk). This makes for an exact clone of all partitions, and I was able to restore it to an 8GB Memorex USB key just fine.

Here's the command I used:
ghost32.exe -id

So, as long as you have a USB key that is greater than 1GB, you'll be fine cloning to it. I tried cloning using -ib (image boot) parameter, and restoring to a slight smaller SanDisk Cruzer 1GB key, but it failed.

I like the idea of using Self Image as well, or dd copy, but I didn't get either to work.

I hope this info helps, as it's nice to have the peace of mind to be able to restore my 3i beta code to the USB key should I mess something up as I "play" with it.

FYI, I began testing on an IntelliStation Z Pro 6223-MC1, so far seems to work fine (after fiddling with BIOS setting and manually selecting the USB mass storage for startup, which showed as a hard drive (not removable media).

Then used a fresh XP build that had no VI3 client, pointed its browser to the ip of the new 3i machine, and downloaded the beta VI3 client (which won't connect to 3.0.2 host fyi).

Next, using 3i, made my first VM on NFS storage (local SATA drives not seen). Tried booting a ubcd4win iso, cloned the 300GB ghost image file into that VM, and 3i actually began to boot OK, but then failed at "initializing memory." Probably time to check out others work with getting ESX to work inside VMs, more likely on workstation, as a learning tool to avoid dedicated test hardware: http://www.vmware.com/community/message.jspa?messageID=427316