[NBLUG/talk] target

[Rick Moen]

Quoting marcus barrett (bamarcus77 at gmail.com):

> i want to burn the Debian 8.6 stable net_install .iso on a thumb drive
> my thumb drive is plugged in and a handy little red light is shining
> i think i can burn the .iso if i knew what my target was.
> 
> lsusb says, bus 001 device 003

Marcus, you'll want to have a look at the last few-ish lines of dmesg[1]
(dmesg | less), at the time you attach the thumb drive.  You should see
lines like this:

[   38.993312] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] 3907029168 512-byte logical blocks: (2.00 TB/1.81 TiB)
[   38.998301] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Write Protect is off
[   38.998418] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Mode Sense: 34 00 00 00
[   38.998428] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through
[   39.008289] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through
[   39.008421]  sdc: sdc1
[   39.044751] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through
[   39.044909] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Attached SCSI disk

In the above case, that's a USB-attached hard drive in an external case
hanging off my server, but you should see something remarkably similar
for your thumb drive.

Notice that the kernel (reporting via dmesg) found block device /dev/sdc, and
on that it found a single filesystem, /dev/sdc1.  That is indeed what
the drive in this case contains.

If this had been a thumb drive onto which I wished to install the Debian
8.6 netinst image, I would then do:

# mount | grep sdc  ##Make sure the thumb drive is unmounted before proceeding
# cp /tmp/debian-8.6.0-amd64-netinst.iso /dev/sdc

Note that the target should be the block device as a whole.  (You should
use whatever device _your_ kernel reports, not necessarily /dev/sdc.)

Also, in case it wasn't obvious, that cp operation will overwrite the
target (which I'm sure you realise, and accounts for your commendable
caution about making sure of the target).

Happy Debianing!

[1] The dmesg logfile, the kernel's ring buffer, is actually ASCII and
kept in a rotated set of archived copies as /var/log/dmesg[.N][.gz] .
So, you can just do 'less /var/log/dmesg' instead of using dmesg(1), if
you prefer..

-- 
Cheers,                "It's easier to act your way into a new way of thinking
Rick Moen              than think your way into a new way of acting."
rick at linuxmafia.com                        -- Jerry Sternin 
McQ! (4x80)