On Mon, Dec 02, 2013 at 14:11:13 +0100,
Florian Weimer <fweimer(a)redhat.com> wrote:
What's the correct way to write an image to a USB stick? I
don't
write to it while any file systems are mounted. Mounting happens
automatically when I plug in the stick, and if I click "Eject" in the
GNOME notification, the /dev/sdb block device assigned to the stick
is still present, but dead—the open system call fails with ENOMEDIUM.
I usually do things at the shell. You should be able to use umount to
unmount the device and then you can safely overwrite the device using
/dev/sdb.
You can use dd to copy over images. (If you do this you probably won't
be able to write other stuff to the file system, depending on the image.
If you want to do that there are tools for doing that.) You probably
want to use a block size larger than the default. (I am not sure if the
writes end up being combined at a lower level, but if not, writing USB
devices 512 bytes at a time is very inefficient because of the erase
block size in these devices is typically in the 128KiB range.)