A question about burning USB stick

[Colin Law]

On 8 January 2011 09:58, Thierry de Coulon <tcoulon at decoulon.ch> wrote:
> 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.

Thanks, I think that is also what another Nils suggested, along with
using sync to ensure all has been written out at the end.

>
> 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.

That is interesting, I have just tried
dd if=myfile.bin of=/dev/sdb
and get
dd: opening `/dev/sdb': Permission denied

Colin