A question about burning USB stick

[Colin Law]

On 11 January 2011 12:05, Amedee Van Gasse <amedee-ubuntu at amedee.be> wrote:
> On Fri, January 7, 2011 13:58, Colin Law wrote:
> [...]
> In short:
>
> * Open 3 terminals
> * In terminal 1: 'watch di -h' (di is an improved version of df, you might
> have to 'aptitude install di' first)
> * terminal 2: 'watch dmesg'
> * plug in the usb stick, you will see it appear in di and dmesg
> * close all Nautilus windows that may have opened when you plugged in the
> stick
> * in terminal 3: 'sudo umount /dev/sdb1' (assuming that the stick was
> /dev/sdb1, di and dmesg will have told you the exact partition name)
> * in terminal 3: 'sudo dd if=myfile.bin of=/dev/sdb bs=10M'
> * Here comes the magic: type 'sync && sync && sync'. The sync command
> forces all cached data to be written to disk immediately. Once is enough,
> but I execute it 3 times in a row, just to be extra paranoid ;)

Thanks Amadee, I like the three terminal approach, I will give that a
go (I am waiting for a new stick at the moment).  The key points,
umount and sync agree with Nils suggestions.

I am not sure about the logic of syncing three times.  Do you build an
app three times if you install by hand? :)
It is a bit disconcerting how it generally comes back instantaneously,
though.  Somehow one would have more confidence that it had done
something if it waited for a couple of seconds.

I wonder whether dd needs a sync.  If I were writing an app like that
I would force a sync at the end.

Colin