boot CD and recognising USB drive

We have a linux based boot CD called helix (free). One of the utilities on the boot CD can take a replica copy of a hard drive and write the replica copy out to a USB drive. The expansion drive we have always seems to install drivers on any new PC (always windows 7 devices) it is plugged into for the first time, and then within a few seconds is read/writeable. My question is... if this USB drive has never been installed on a specific Laptop PC, and the drivers have never been installed etc, when you use this boot CD, and attach the HDD, will the boot CD be able to write data out to the USB drive, or would the drivers first need to be installed on the machine? If of any use - the laptop will be windows 8.