© copyright 01.Apr.2010 by Paul Bradley posted under Linux.
In this short video, I am going to show you how to determine the device id for your USB flash drive under Linux.
For example, lets say you want to create a bootable USB of Moblin, which by the way is a great distribution for netbooks like the Acer Aspire One, you would need to follow the instructions on the using the Moblin Live image page. Here you will find instructions on how to use the Linux DD command, to copy the image file to your USB drive, but you need to know the drive id to use this command.
To determine the USB drives id, you can use the dmesg command, which outputs the Linux kernel message buffer, to the screen.
After inserting your USB drive into your computer, you need to start a terminal window by going to Applications, Accessories and selecting Terminal from the menu options. Once the terminal window has loaded, then you need to type the following command:-
dmesg | tail -20The tail command restricts the output to the last 20 entries, here you can see it has detected my USB Flash drive, and what your looking for is something similar to the highlighted text, this is my USB drives id, yours may be different.
So in this example, sdb would be the reference that I enter into this DD command sequence.
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Thanks to Nicola Evans for providing the voice over for this video.
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