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That's odd. It should be fine, but here are some things to check:

- Make sure that none of the filesystems on the USB stick are mounted before you begin. Otherwise, the filesystem drivers might corrupt something.

- Use a larger block size that's a power of 2 (e.g. bs=4096k). The default is 512 bytes, which is too small. This should just speed things up, but using writes that are smaller than the actual flash erase blocks can cause a lot of extra erases, and maybe your flash stick breaks when you do that.

- Run 'sync' after using dd, and wait for disk activity to finish. dd doesn't flush to disk by default.

- Don't use an amd64 image on a 32-bit machine. Don't use ia64 on a 64-bit PC.

- Try using synchronized I/O:

    sudo dd if=debian-7.2.0-i386-CD-1.iso of=/dev/sdx bs=4096k oflag=sync



Thanks, I'll come back and read this next time I do it. The first thing I checked was the bit length, though it could be the file system type or the synchronized io




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