On July 23, 2021 at 8:12 PM Michael Hamilton <michael@actrix.gen.nz> wrote:
On Saturday 24 July 2021, mcgarrett wrote:
Why doesn't this work:
dd bs=4M if=/home/doug/Downloads/Win10_21H1_English_x64 of=/dev/sda
MOST WORRYINGLY, the destination /dev/sda is often the first and most critical device in any system. On my system, /dev/sda is the device that contains my OpenSUSE operating system. If I were to dd to that device I would wipe out my OpenSUSE root partition. Are you VERY SURE the destination device is the correct one?
Yes, I am sure. sda was a 2nd ssd. Don't ask me how come the installed drive is this crazy name, but it is. I disconnected sda after the lightning strike, and I'll deal with it separately--it was never used, and installed on speculation that I might get ambitious and save some files to it. I may still do that, since it looks like there is some serious damage somewhere to the machine.
I would normally write ISO's to USB-drives, and I would normally use SUSE Studio Imagewriter GUI to ease this task (the zypper package is called imagewriter). USB-drives would more likely have device names further down the alphabet, for example, I have one plugged as /dev/sdh right at this moment (the sda, sdb, sdc, .. sdh part depends on how many devices are resident in the system). (It's not necessarily wrong to use dd, but it's a command with no safeguards.)
You want to be very sure of the destination before executing the dd. If in doubt, perhaps followup with another email to the list clearly stating what you are trying to achieve before proceeding further.
However, if you are sure the destination is correct, I can see that the filename listed is Win10_21H1_English_x64.iso, so why have you supplied dd Win10_21H1_English_x64 without the iso suffix? The dd command could be amended to:
dd bs=4M if=/home/doug/Downloads/Win10_21H1_English_x64.iso of=/dev/correctdestination
Note that I had disconnected ssd /dev/sda. I used fdisk to determine what the usb stick was called, and it said sda. History (in part): 104 2021-07-22 02:00:37 fdisk -l 105 2021-07-22 02:11:34 smartctl -c/dev/nvme)n1 106 2021-07-22 02:12:36 smartctl -c/dev/nvme0n1 107 2021-07-22 02:13:02 smartctl -h 108 2021-07-22 02:18:09 smartctl --all /dev/sda 109 2021-07-22 02:20:43 smartctl --all /dev//dev/nvme0n1 110 2021-07-22 02:21:02 smartctl -h I was not aware of ImageWriter, but I will install it and run it--I'm not a fan of dd either, altho I have used it once or twice, under the tutelage of some other correspondent. Thanx for the information. I hope I will remember some of it; thanx to the lightning there are problems with this machine and one of them is that it cannot see any printer. Or anything else on the net except the router. (An also damaged laptop cannot do mail anymore, but can print! What a mess! I have ordered a cheapie refurb desktop to tide me over until I get things back in some kind of working order. --doug
I WOULD NOT USE THE CORRECTED COMMAND UNLESS YOU ARE VERY VERY SURE about the destination.
Michael
Here is the downloaded file in /home/doug/Downloads:
-rw-r--r-- 1 doug users 5824122880 Jul 22 22:20 Win10_21H1_English_x64.iso
Here is the fail message:
dd: failed to open '/home/doug/Downloads/Win10_21H1_English_x64': No such file or directory
(Since I am IN that directory, I first tried without specifying the directory, but got the same failure.)
Confused as usual--doug