Currupted USB Drive with dd - Proper Usage?

[David Hunt]

I was trying to create a bootable USB drive using the diskboot.img file 
under /images in FC2 disc1. I had already done something similar with 
FC1,  but didn't document it. So I have used this drive to install FC1. 
I know it is possible.

I originally just copied the files to the usb drive using cp after 
mounting the image. That seemed to copy OK. But since the readme file 
indicated that dd should be used, I decided to start from scratch, and 
document the entire thing.

I found a thread about using dd on the test-list and tried the same 
command string. Assuming that I have mounted the disc1 iso at 
/mnt/cdrom, and the usb drive is located at /dev/sda, with sda1 being a 
bootable VFAT partition, verified with sfdisk, the command is...

"dd if=/mnt/cdrom/images/diskboot.img of=/dev/sda1". The bad thing is 
that it doesn't copy the files in the image, instead it created over 
4000 files and directories of just plain garbage. Can anyone tell me how 
to use dd properly to transfer the contents of the image to the usb 
drive? Or, why dd should be used at all? Why was dd recommended if just 
copying the files would work?

Feeling foolish, and wanting some guidance.