A question about burning USB stick

[Amedee Van Gasse]

On Sat, January 8, 2011 10:38, Nils Kassube wrote:

> 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.

I understand the problem and your solution, but maybe this is only a
concern if the partition is almost full? If the filesystem doesn't fit on
the card, wouldn't fsck fix that?

I always fill up my sticks with nulls (dd if=/dev/null
of=/media/stick/delete bs=1M && sync && sync && sync && rm
/media/stick/delete && sync && sync && sync) before I dd them to an image.
If I was extra paranoid, I could copy all files to my hard disk, delete
them from the stick, and then copy them back. That way I would be 100%
sure that there was no fragmentation.

Your thoughts?