On Mon, Sep 26, 2016 at 11:14 PM, jd1008 <jd1008@gmail.com> wrote:
But Rick, the OP was trying to dd into /dev/sda

How can it be that the system boots off of some disk that is not /dev/sda,
and /dev/sda is empty? and is a usb flash???

Also, why would the op get a message to the effect "disk is full"
when it is a 32GB flash?

My suspicion is that it is not a USB disk, and that it is a very old and small IDE disk.

-JD

If you look at my reply, he dd'd into a partition which I suspect was only 524Mb.  Odds are, as you mentioned, the system is probably hosed if in fact the it was a system drive.  An IDE would show as a "hd" [a,b,c,d]; hence the "ls" command to find the USB. If in fact he does have an IDE drive and it shows as "hd*" then it would explain the how the USB would be "sda" Alternatively he could use:

df -h

but I felt the output would have been too confusing until the OP could better understand. 

Kevin, thanks for the clarification, was just keeping it simple.

-- Fred