cli guru needed

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Sun, 2009-08-02 at 20:49 -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:
> >/dev/sdb is not a directory. Unless your setup is *very* nonstandard,
> >it's a device, in fact a disk drive. In the worst case the app might
> >want to seek on it, but there's no reason it shouldn't be able to do
> >that.
> 
> Another item that has blown on by is that /dev/sdb is the whole
> device.  One 
> must have at least one mountable partition setup on the device, and
> the 
> filesystem suitably initialized and mounted before the file can be
> written.  
> There are some exceptions to that rule, generally involving either
> an .iso 
> image, or 'dd' which can make an identical image on any writable
> device at 
> least big enough to hold the image.

I was assuming the latter, given that the OP's version uses dd. However
it's starting to look like he may not be entirely sure of what he's
doing.

poc