A question about burning USB stick

[Nils Kassube]

Colin Law wrote:
> On 8 January 2011 01:07, Basil Chupin <blchupin at iinet.net.au> wrote:
> > On 07/01/2011 23:58, Colin Law wrote:
> >> I have an image that I wish to burn to a USB stick using dd.
> >> The command I am going to use to
> >> burn it is
> >> sudo dd if=myfile.bin of=/dev/sdb bs=10M

> > 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.

Basil, you don't really "burn" a CD / DVD either or do you set it on 
fire? (SCNR)

I think from the context you quoted (the dd command) it is clear what 
Colin intended to do.

> 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.

Just a side note: I have two 4GB CF cards of the same model which have a 
slightly different number of tracks announced to the kernel. I only 
noticed this fact when I wanted to make a clone of one card (the one 
with more tracks) to the other one. Therefore I now make the last 
partition slightly smaller than possible. Then there are no data lost on 
the last tracks if I ever have to restore a backup to a new card.


Nils