14 points
*
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
17 points
4 points
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?
1 point
2 points
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.
2 points
Yep that’s right, but I use fdisk to check my drives before writing on them and it also requires sudo…
1 point
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 :)
