shamelessly stolen from nixCraft on mastodon

    • AccountMaker@slrpnk.net
      1·
      11 months ago

      I actually did this once. My USB was on /dev/sda instead of sdb and I didn’t bother to check. It took me like 2 days to fix it because you can’t just delete partitions and start over normally, it changes some flags on your drive that you need to manually reset for them to be usable again. Fun times.

    • azertyfun@sh.itjust.works
      2·
      11 months ago

      Except the proposed alternative should not be cp or pv, but dd bs=4M oflag=direct,sync status=progress.

      I feel like I’m taking crazy pills with all the advice in this thread, because for USB keys you will otherwise end up instantly filling the write cache… which will block the apparent progress of the copy operation (so why even use pv since all you’re doing is measuring your RAM speed and available cache size) as well as heavily slow down (even potentially partially freeze in some circumstances) the rest of your system as the kernel is running out of free pages and can’t flush caches fast enough due to the slow-ass write speeds of usb keys.

      * (Alternatively there is a kernel setting somewhere to disable caching globally for a block device… but in most cases caching is good, just not when you’re flashing an ISO).

    • kbotc@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      11 months ago

      Disk Duplicator is a destroyer? Man, I used to image so many drives with DD back in my helpdesk days…

      • Affine Connection@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        11 months ago

        dd does not stand for “disk duplicator”. That’s a modern backronymization that doesn’t reflect the original general usage of the command which is to “convert and copy”. Efficiently (with respect to I/O) copying raw data is only one of its intended purposes; it also converts text encodings.

    • Holzkohlen@feddit.de
      1·
      11 months ago

      I just make use of my paranoia, so I triple and quadruple check. Then get a coffee and quadruple check again. Never messed up once

    • bzLem0n@lemmy.ca
      0·
      11 months ago

      It’s even easier to prevent confusion if you use /dev/disk/by-id/ id’s, it only took a few times of overwriting the wrong disk to figure that out.

      • MaliciousKebab@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        10 months ago

        When I accidentally decimated my external hard drive, it had NTFS cause there were a few windows machines I would plug it in. Then I reformatted the disk but then I thought to myself, should I have another partition for my Linux machine because that drive gets corrupted and then I need to plug to a Windows machine to repair it once in a while. Then I created an ext4 partition on the disk. Then a few days after I shrinked the NTFS partition and extended the ext4 to the whole disk. Now that disk only has one partition called sda2. Which is kinda weird but makes it easier to distinguish from others disks on the system.

        • Nithanim@programming.dev
          1·
          11 months ago

          Not sure if it is equal on all distros but on every one I have used it’s a readable string of muliple components. One of them is “usb” for a usb mass storage, so if it is the only one you have connected to your computer it is very obvious. For like sata disks it has the manufacturer and serial on it so you can match what drive it is you want to write to. Also, the name is pretty unique (on your sysytem at least, globally I don’t know), so even if you swap hardware around, you cannot write to the wrong storage if you got the right name. Like “sdb” can be reassigned, but the id is an id.

  • foyrkopp@lemmy.world
    1·
    11 months ago

    Anyone who hits enter on a dd command without triple-checking it gets exactly what they deserve.