Re: Dangerous course of action suggested by USB boot instructions?
On Mon, Nov 14, 2005 at 02:03:27PM +0100, Lorenzo Colitti wrote:
> 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... :(
If changing the partition table (or removing it) and reformating with
FAT changes the speed of the stick, there is something seriously wrong
with the stick's design.
If it is really slow, you might be running with sync mount, which is a
very very bad idea for flash memory.
And if you don't write a boot block to the device what makes it
bootable? Unless USB booting is even more screwy that I thought (I have
ever bothered to try it), then it should still need a bootable device to
boot which would require something writing to the MBR of the device.
Len Sorensen
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