A question about burning USB stick

[Colin Law]

On 8 January 2011 01:07, Basil Chupin <blchupin at iinet.net.au> wrote:
> 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.

I have an image of the complete stick in myfile.bin that I wish to
dump onto the stick using dd.   It is the equivalent of burning an iso
image onto CD which is why I used the word burn.  The image contains a
bootable Ubuntu image.  Having installed Ubuntu on the stick and
installed and configured all the applications I want to use I use dd
to make a backup of the stick so that if it fails (as this one has) I
can restore the image to a new stick without having to go through the
effort of making a new image.

>
> 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.

No, it is a complete image of the stick.

Colin