[wellylug] DD no go

[Cliff Pratt]

David Antliff wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 4, 2008 at 5:56 PM, David Chord <gnome at gnome.co.nz> wrote:
>>  Command line is dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb
>>
>>  Error is "dd: writing to `/dev/sdb' : Input/output error
>>  8395977+0 records in
>>  8395976+0 records out
>>  4298739712 bytes (4.3 GB) copied, 701.827s, 6.1 MB/s
>>
>>  After the 2nd time I formatted sdb to fat32 (was a blank disk on the first
>>  run), no luck.
> 
> First of all, you shouldn't format a DISK device (e.g. sdb) at all -
> you should only ever format PARTITIONS (which are subdivisions of a
> disk, e.g. sdb1, sdb2). That said, if you dd to the disk device you
> overwrite anything that was there anyway, so it's redundant formatting
> it with anything.
> 
> Secondly, that's normally what happens when you run out of space on
> the destination device, but after only 4.3GB? How big is the disk
> drive? I'm guessing much bigger than 4.3GB... so it sounds like you
> might have a problem with the destination disk?
> 
> Thirdly, there's nothing special that comes to mind about the number
> 4298739712, in case you were wondering.
> 
It's pretty close to 4GB which is a FAT32 filesystem limit. Or is it? 
I'm fairly sure there are a number of limits, 2GB being one of them.

http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/file-size-limit-exceeded-error-under-linux-and-solution/

But other sites dispute this.

Cheers,

Cliff