• foudinfo@jlai.lu
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    13
    ·
    edit-2
    5 months ago

    My favorite way to create a boot media is simply to use cat. No arguments, no shenanigans just a cat into the device :

    cat debian.iso > /dev/sda

    • Ghoelian@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      5 months ago

      iirc there was a reason you should use dd instead of directly copying the data, I think something to do with device block alignment or something?

      • foudinfo@jlai.lu
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        5 months ago

        That could be possible but for the moment I didn’t encouter any problem with cat. I think I’m going to stick with it for the time being.

    • qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      5 months ago

      One caveat is that you will need write access to the drive, which probably means you need to run as root — can’t run that with sudo as-is, unlike dd.

      • foudinfo@jlai.lu
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        5 months ago

        Yep that’s right, but I use fdisk to check my drives before writing on them and it also requires sudo…

        • qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          5 months ago

          Right, I just meant that you can’t sudo cat file > /dev/sda but you can sudo dd ..., because IO redirection isn’t elevated to root with sudo. I’m not saying anything too profound :)

          • foudinfo@jlai.lu
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            5 months ago

            Oh right, my bad x) I agree, it’s a little bit akward to use su then cat everytime.