Dangerous course of action suggested by USB boot instructions?

[Lorenzo Colitti <lorenzo@colitti.com>]

Hi,

the debian-installer documentation at:

http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/manual/en.i386/ch04s04.html

states that to copy the disk image to the USB stick you must do:

> # zcat boot.img.gz > /dev/sda

Please consider changing this to /dev/sda1. This is a much safer choice 
because it's what all other OSes (and some BIOSes) expect.

I used the /dev/sda method and it trashed my USB stick (MuVo V200). Its 
partition table was gone (which was not obvious to me: the image might 
have contained a partition table too). Booting didn't work. In the end I 
was able to recover somewhat with fdisk and mkdosfs, but now the stick's 
transfer rate is down to 7 kB/s, which is *not* funny... :(


Regards,
Lorenzo

--
Lorenzo Colitti                          http://www.colitti.com/lorenzo/