On 4/8/2011 8:15 AM, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote: > Les Mikesell wrote: >> On 4/8/11 5:28 AM, Timothy Murphy wrote: >>> >>>> It should go to the raw disk device, not a partition and you shouldn't >>>> need to format first. >>> >>> The reason I re-formatted it was that fdisk said >>> there was no valid partition table after dd-ing bootdisk.img onto >>> /dev/sdb . >> >> I thought small usb devices generally didn't have a partition table and >> just have one filesystem on the raw device. But I don't have a lot of >> experience with them. In any case the img file should have whatever > needs to be >> there. > <snip> > Nope, they do. As I mentioned in my build of the USB key install, I have > two partitions on the key, one that's 10M, and is FAT formatted, and the > rest of the 8G that's ext2. USB disks _can_ have partitions (obviously, since you can stick about any drive into a usb adapter), but small ones typically don't and you don't need them to boot. The bootdisk.img layout appears to be a vfat on the raw disk (no partitioning) with syslinux configure to make it boot. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com