usb bootable stick

[Ranjan Maitra]

> Ranjan Maitra:
> > In my experience with Fedora (only), I have found that mounting is
> > essential. Otherwise it writes to the mount point, but not the device.
> 
> Why would anyone think that a command like:
> 
>   dd  if=boot.iso  of=/dev/sdb  bs=8M
> 
> Is going to write to anywhere else than /dev/sdb?

No, I would not think so. But if the device is not mounted, would it not write to the mount point, especially because you are doing so as root (so nothing to stop you). This logic seems to make sense to me, and indeed is what happens when I have done it accidentally (without mounting the USB drive).
 
> In general, trying to do a direct write to a device, while it's mounted
> on the filesystem, is inherently risky.  You stand a very good chance
> that the mounted filesystem is going to stomp over the top of your raw
> write.  The only way I could see it *not* stomping over it, is if you
> yanked the USB drive out without dismounting it (another stupid thing to
> do).

Agreed to this last point, but not what happened.

I don't know and I am not an expert. However, from experiment, observation and inference, I have noticed that unless the usb is mounted, dd does not copy to the device. (This happened as recently as last week).

Many thanks and best wishes,
Ranjan

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