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3

The last paragraph of the SliTaz 3.0 Release Notes says the following about the liveCD:

The ISO image now uses a 'hybrid' system: it can also be copied onto an USB stick without formating it (using dd).

Does anyone know how to do this?

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migrated from stackoverflow.com Oct 29 '11 at 11:11

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3  
DEAR GOD BE CAREFUL WITH dd! It's nicknamed disk destroyer for a reason. – Rob Oct 29 '11 at 20:49
    
@Rob Can you list the dos and donts please? I would hate to waste my drive trying to make it bootable. – Gui Imamura Dec 12 '15 at 12:42
up vote 17 down vote accepted

dd if=/path/to/your/isofile of=/your/usb/disk try this.

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should I include ~/ in path ? – weis26 Oct 29 '11 at 10:14
2  
@weis26: You can, ~ is just replace with the current users home directory path. Use it if either the if or of paths are in your home directory sure... – Matt Joiner Oct 29 '11 at 10:20
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@weis26 Depends on whether you want to use a relative path or absolute path. By the way, using dd would make your usb device read-only and to make it a 'normal' usb device you shall re-partition the device. – starrify Oct 29 '11 at 10:21
7  
bs=8M or so would speed this up quite a bit... also, should mention using mount to see what disk is mounted at /media/83... – Kimvais Oct 29 '11 at 10:26
    
@starrify - I can't figure out what you mean by saying dd "would make your usb device read-only". dd does not change capabilities of devices, it just shoves data from input to output. – Florenz Kley Sep 22 '17 at 13:43
up vote 7 down vote

If you want to be able to view the progress or get an ETA, you can add Pipe View (pv) into the mix, e.g.:

dd if=<path to input file> | pv -s <size e.g. 1377M> | dd of=<path to target device>

This will give output like:

850MiB 0:05:18 [6.44MiB/s] [===================> ] 61% ETA 0:03:16

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up vote 6 down vote

Usually you want to write to the device. Use df to find the entry:

/dev/sdd1 31933168 27690992 4242176 87% /media/Fat

Then with dd, use the of=/dev/sdd, not /media/Fat or /dev/sdd1. If you give it a block size it's usually quicker, so I usually give it something like -bs=1M.

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3  
df will only show mounted filesystems. Bad Idea(TM) to dd stuff to devices that contain mounted filesystems.. – Florenz Kley Oct 16 '14 at 21:18
    
@FlorenzKley So instead I should use...? – Olle Härstedt Sep 19 '17 at 18:02
    
Use df if you can but only a device with a file system can be mounted. I sometimes use 'gparted', which will give you it's assigned device id for use in DD even sans an fs. DD is alluded to the DD card in IBM JCL and as a data dump utility. Triple check where you are writing. I use large block size along with the 'conv=fdatasync,' which forces a physical write to the device before finish. – user65913 Sep 20 '17 at 23:52
    
@OlleHärstedt before using a tool that writes directly to the blockdevice, remove upper layers that use it at the moment (and mostly expect they are the only ones writing to it). In this example: umount /media/Fat or umount /dev/sdd1. To get information about block device usage on Linux, suggest you use lsblk – Florenz Kley Sep 22 '17 at 13:37

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