Situation: I want to re-use an external drive which already contains some data. So I will create a disk image on an external drive in case I need to copy that image back to the drive in the future. Solution: Normally, I just run dd to create an file.img when the disk is small, e.g. SD card. However, the drive capacity is 512GB. So a better option is to compress the image. Here is how this can be done: ...
I need to create a bootable FreeBSD install disk and the downloaded file happened to be on a Mac laptop. Since OS X is based on BSD, it also comes with dd utility. After a USB is inserted, I need to identify the disk. This can be done using diskutil command: $ sudo diskutil list /dev/disk0 (internal): #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: GUID_partition_scheme 251.0 GB disk0 1: EFI EFI 314.6 MB disk0s1 2: Apple_APFS Container disk1 250.7 GB disk0s2 /dev/disk1 (synthesized): #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: APFS Container Scheme - +250.7 GB disk1 Physical Store disk0s2 1: APFS Volume Macintosh HD 98.6 GB disk1s1 2: APFS Volume Preboot 21.4 MB disk1s2 3: APFS Volume Recovery 509.8 MB disk1s3 4: APFS Volume VM 3.2 GB disk1s4 /dev/disk2 (external, physical): #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: Apple_partition_scheme *2.1 GB disk2 1: Apple_partition_map 4.1 KB disk2s1 2: Apple_HFS 2.4 MB disk2s2 From the above output, the USB drive is /dev/disk2. Now, I can use dd to copy the image file to the USB drive using the following command: ...
Every time there is a new release of Linux distro, I need to create a bootable USB. And, I forgot how I did it last time. So, I tried by using the “Startup Disk Creator” program installed on my Ubuntu workstation, only to find out that it didn’t even work. After a while I remember, it was just a matter of using dd command to copy the ISO image to the USB. ...
The RaspBSD image for Raspberry Pi can be found at http://raspbsd.org/raspberrypi.html. After it’s been downloaded, we need to copy it to a microSD card. Before we can do that, we need to find out the device name represents the microSD card. One way to find out is to plug the card in, and check the newest messages of dmesg. $ dmesg ... [282430.689656] mmc0: new SDHC card at address aaaa [282430.691039] mmcblk0: mmc0:aaaa SU08G 7.40 GiB [282430.711060] mmcblk0: p1 p2 In my case, using Ubuntu 15.10, the card is detected as mmcblk0. ...