A question about burning USB stick

[Thierry de Coulon]

On Saturday 08 January 2011 09:40:36 am Colin Law wrote:
(...)
> >> 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.
(...)
> I have an image of the complete stick in myfile.bin that I wish to
> dump onto the stick using dd. 

I think your problem is with "eject", because it "shuts off" the stick (I had 
this problem with a card reader in my laptop).

What I think you shoud do is:

- plug in the stick
- check how it is mounted (I guess it should automount as /dev/sdb1 from what 
you wrote)
- umount /dev/sdb1 (at the command line!)

Now you stick should still be there (you can test by mounting /dev/sdb1 on 
some mountpoint).Now dd should work on /dev/sdb.

Note that you probably nead either sudo or su for most of these commands to 
work. I just tried this procedure on my computer and it works.

Regards,

Thierry