A question about burning USB stick

[Basil Chupin]

On 07/01/2011 23:58, Colin Law wrote:
> Hi
> I have an image that I wish to burn to a USB stick using dd.  When I
> insert the stick it is mounted (it already has valid partitions on it)
> and
> sudo fdisk -l
> shows that it is mounted as sdb.  The command I am going to use to burn it is
> sudo dd if=myfile.bin of=/dev/sdb bs=10M
> but it does not seem right to burn it while it is mounted.  However if
> I eject it then it is no longer /dev/sdb and the dd command fails.

Colin,

I do not understand what you really mean by doing a "burn to a USB 
stick". One burns a DVD or a CD but not a flash drive.

All you are trying to do is to copy a file to the flash drive, right? 
And because the flash drive is more than likely formatted in FAT32 you 
can only copy over a file no larger than 4GB.

If this is what you are trying to do - to copy over a file - then simply 
plug in the flash drive and use something like mc (midnight commander, 
which is what I always use) or nautilus (ie, the file manager) to copy 
the file from sourceX to the flash drive. Simple, I do it almost 
everyday when doing backups of files on my and my wife's computers or 
transferring files from one computer to the other. No"dds" or anything - 
just a simply straightforward copy. You could probably use the standard 
"cp" command to do same.

Only thing to watch is that after the copy has been done, SAFELY REMOVE 
the flash so that all the data has, in fact. been written to the flash. 
As you select 'safely remove', watch the light on the flash: if there is 
unwritten data this light will keep flashing as the data is being 
written and when this stops then remove the flash.

BC

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