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[–] 113 points 2 years ago

Your USB is probably named '/' or '~' so give that a go.

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  • [+] 95 points 2 years ago (1 child)
  • [–] 19 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 74 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    When you hit enter on the DD command, and your main storage light suddenly starts flashing.

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  • [–] 54 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    When you hit enter on the DD command, and your eyes suddenly start flashing.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)
  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    So? I'm just creating an 8 GiB swap file.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Try btrfs, where with only 5 hours of research you can create a swap file without writing the entire file.
    Also there is no other option, the 5h are non-optional.

    After doing that twice, In my / now lives

    /swapfile-howto

    # this is btrfs not a normal file system.
    # We have to create and allocate the file in a btrfs friendly way,
    # and tell btrfs to not move or segment it.
    
    touch /swapfile999
    chmod 600 /swapfile999
    truncate -s 0 /swapfile999
    chattr +C /swapfile999
    fallocate -l 999G /swapfile999
    mkswap /swapfile999
    swapon /swapfile999 -p 200
    

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I admire your dedication, but you really could've just done this

    btrfs fi mkswapfile --size 16G /swap
    swapon /swap
    
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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago

    Huh, thank you for telling me, I'll amend the file with that info. This being a thing will probably spare many the troubles I experienced.

    I did some digging to reconstruct what happened in my case. The file was created on 2022-12-08, and I remember this being after I rediscovered my earlier approach, from - going by my browsing history - mid september 2022. I worked through plenty of wiki pages at the time, including the btrfs docs on swapfiles, where I probably got my commands. The truncate in there to fix earlier mistakes is something I would keep in, but not add myself, so I must have copied that pages solution. Interestingly, going by archive.org, between dec 02 and dec 13 the documentation on btrfs fi mkswapfile was added to that page.
    I am in no way confident in my memory here, but I vaguely recall seeing that command, and being somewhat surprised to not remember it from earlier. That confusion may have even contributed to pushing me to create the file.
    Had I seen it, I probably would have tried the command and seen it not exist. Following the note of btrfs 6.1 being required, I would have checked the version and seen that my distro didn't have btrfs-progs 6.1, not even as an alpha on the development channel.
    I may also have remembered there being multiple commands needed earlier, and not wanting to deviate from the proven method dismissed the apparently simpler method.

    To complete this very meaningful and productive story, on 2022-12-23 my distro got the early christmas present of btrfs-progs 6.1 as an unstable release in the dev channel. After many retractions and republishings of a total of 4 subversions, on 2023-03-04 the first stable release of 6.1.x was made available.

    I was 6 months early. Or rather the btrfs devs were 6 months late.

    Edit (actually not edit because I didn't send yet):
    I actually checked the repo and the documentation changed on dec 06. Here is the commit. The corresponding release occurred on dec 22.
    Dumping 30mins into writing this actually resulted with a memorable story. By chance I stumbled over the documentation of a new feature, 2 days after it had been written, but 2 weeks before even the first alpha release containing it was created.

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  • [–] 72 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    You used something called disk destroyer, and you just found out why

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    [+] 60 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)
  • [–] 16 points 2 years ago (1 child)
  • [–] 32 points 2 years ago (1 child)
  • [–] 51 points 2 years ago (4 children)
  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    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).

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    [–] 47 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Another advantage of having a NVMe SSD, hard to confuse /dev/nvme0n1p2 with /dev/sda1

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  • [–] 16 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    How can I figure out which direct device is associated with a specific id?

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years 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.

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  • [–] 45 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    Fun fact: you can use cat image.iso > /dev/device and it (should) just works.

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  • [–] 30 points 2 years ago

    That's why it called dd: don't dare

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  • [–] 21 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I always use the status=progress argument.

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  • [–] 17 points 2 years ago

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

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago

    I always prefer the bulkier /dev/disk/by-id/ symlinks because of this

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago

    Be me

    Want to install archlinux just to try it

    Accidentally installed archlinux live environment on my main hard disk using dd

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago

    Goofoyou, goofoyou!

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