[question] using dd to flash & format thumbdrives

pfr

I've been trying to flash a thumb drive with a NetBSD.img using dd without much success.

I do believe it may have worked the first time, but that was with a 9.2 img and I decided later to give HEAD a try so I attempted to overwrite the previous img with the new one using

# dd if=/home/dave/NetBSD-9.99.97-amd64-install.img of=/dev/sd0e bs=1m

And it just hangs. I let it sit for over 20 minutes and nothing happened. I cannot escape the process with Ctrl-C and eventually consumes enough memory that my wm keybinds no longer respond and I cannot open a new terminal to kill the process, and I have to hard shutdown using the power button on my laptop.

I thought I'd try wipe the drive with

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sd0e

and the same thing happened. I cannot understand why this takes so long.

Am I just not being patient enough of is something wrong? I'm attempting to do this with a 4GB thumb drive on a thinkPad x230 with 8GB of ram.

~~I also want to know how to format thumb drives for specific filesystems FAT32 etc.~~

edit:

use mkfs ?

# mkfs.fat -F 32 /dev/sd0e -n "USB Drive"

edit2:

or better to use newfs ?

Chapter 13. You will realize you did several things wrong.

pfr I thought I'd try wipe the drive with dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sd0e and the same thing happened. I cannot understand why this takes so long.

Depending on the size of your usb, this could taket ages. You are trying to overwrite every singel bite with zero.
Although, you can do it, this is not necessary, it's enough to overwrite the first few Mb of the drive. See the same chapter.

Here is a short version.

rvp

pfr And it just hangs. I let it sit for over 20 minutes and nothing happened. I cannot escape the process with Ctrl-C [...]

That's what happens if you use the block device sd0 instead of the raw (ie. char.) device rsd0. Or, you can add oflag=direct to that dd cmdline--like you would on Linux, which suffers from the same problem.

Also, sd0e is wrong: use either rsd0d or rsd0 (which is the same device on NetBSD) as shown in the Guide example.

Use the progress=NN operand to see when blocks are written.

pfr

pin Depending on the size of your usb, this could taket ages

4gb - OP updated

pin it's enough to overwrite the first few Mb of the drive.

Ahhh gotchya, I forgot to add count=1

@pin

pin@mybox $ doas newfs -O 2 /dev/rsd0e

I'm guessing this is what I did originally as I would have just followed your directions, but chapter 13 has a slitghtly different command:

# newfs_msdos /dev/rsd0e
/dev/rsd0e: 30189264 sectors in 1886829 FAT32 clusters (8192 bytes/cluster)
MBR type: 11
bps=512 spc=16 res=32 nft=2 mid=0xf0 spt=32 hds=64 hid=0 bsec=30218779 bspf=14741 rdcl=2 infs=1 bkbs=2

newfs -O 2 looks like it'll create a FFSv2 file system. I need my USB to be transferrable accross BSD, Linux and Windows so I'd be best to use newfs_msdos?

pfr Ahhh gotchya, I forgot to add count=1

No, you forgot block size and count

pfr newfs -O 2 looks like it'll create a FFSv2 file system. I need my USB to be transferrable accross BSD, Linux and Windows

Quoting myself bellow

Obviously, if you want to share the drive with another machine running another OS you should not format it to FFSv2
Check the output of fdisk -l for the options of file systems and man newfs for the flags and options before writing the partitions to disk.