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Questions tagged [usb-flash-drive]

111 questions
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USB storage media - data integrity issues on linux

I've always been somewhat paranoid about verifying data backed up to removable media, so after copying stuff to a USB flash drive or portable HDD, I invariably unmount the drive, remount it and diff -q the stored files with the originals. Years ago…
timday
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How do you specify static mount points for removable usb drives?

I have a bunch of usb ports and hubs. When you attach usb thumb drives, Linux assigns them to virtual block devices on a first-come first-serve basis. It creates sdd, sde, sdf, and so on, regardless of which port I plug the drives into. We copy…
Nick
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Cannot initialize disk in PowerShell : Initialize-Disk throws "The disk has already been initialized"

I'm trying to change the flash drive's partition style to GPT using PowerShell, but the cmdlet throws "The disk has already been initialized" (even though I've cleaned the drive): PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> Clear-Disk 5 -RemoveData -RemoveOEM PS…
Ark-kun
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Pros and cons of installing ESXi on a SSD vs USB flash drive?

I'm debating on doing an ESXi 4.1/5.0 installation on a USB stick or a pair of 32GB SATA II SSDs (RAID1 mirror). According to VMWare's documentation, when ESXi is booting it looks for a 4GB space for a scratch partition. Assuming the USB stick I use…
osij2is
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booting FreeBSD 9 from USB stick: boot error

I am trying to boot FreeBSD 9 from a USB stick that I created following the official guidelines: dd if=FreeBSD-9.0-RELEASE-i386-memstick.img of=/dev/da0 bs=64k Booting fails with a simple 'boot error'. I have used this USB stick for quite a while…
ssc
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How do you prevent users from using USB drives which circumvent security

We need a way to prevent users from copying anything to and from USB drives unless they are a system administrator. What can be done to remove this access for security purposes.
Jeremy E
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Is there a quick way to safely remove a USB flash drive under Windows?

USB flash drives are an essential tool for any admin but I find the process of safely removing a flash drive under Windows to be inconvenient (click the tray icon, find your drive in the too-much-information USB bus tree, click stop, etc...). I know…
Arnold Spence
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USB virtual storage device service

I'm not sure if this exists. I have a client with a DVR that will accept a USB drive as a backup location. On an ubuntu server, can I create an empty file with dd, attach it to whatever the service is called, connect both computers with a usb cable…
user38537
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How to protect against against data access if USB drive gets lost?

Using any external USB drive under Windows XP, how to encrypt/decrypt files on the fly, but without too much slow-down from the overhead. Most of the obvious solutions like Truecrypt won't work because with these the host system needs to have…
Rob Kam
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How can I create a self extracting / self burning bootable USB image?

I need to put a bootable image of a usb stick on a website so that our users can download it and burn it to USB themselves. They aren't especially technical, so I don't want them to have to download any other software (e.g. Rufus / MagicISO etc). My…
Ben
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Setting up LiveCD + USB drive boot combination for a headless server

I'm setting up a large software RAID array using MDADM, and don't want to waste a drive bay on a system disk. Unfortunately, the server I'm working with has trouble booting from a USB drive, so I'm attempting a workaround. I want to create a LiveCD…
sangretu
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How to clone a USB flash drive using dd?

Using 'dd' to clone a USB drive -cfdisk: resized the destination partition to be of same size made the partition bootable same 'type' ext3 ran 'mkfs.ext3' after exit cfdisk then dd if=dev/sda1 of=/dev/sdb1 result booting: Missing operating…
MentalBlister
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Easy Bootloader for USB Thumb Drives

Are there any bootloaders designed for usb drives that make it easy to boot multiple distributions and utilities. I've installed sysrescuecd, supergrub, ultimate boot cd and other various linux distros on my usb drive. The lame thing is all their…
Richard
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How to clone Linux hard drive to smaller flash drive

Currently, I'm trying to clone a hard drive that has Linux installed to a 16GB flash drive. The hard drive is 233GB, but df -h shows that only 3.5G is in use. Can I use Clonezilla to create an image using just the allocated amount of space and copy…
AndreasKralj
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USB Flash Drives As Boot Drives In File Server

I'm designing a file server based around ZFS and I'm considering using USB flash drives in RAID 1 as boot devices. It seems that few people do this, and I'm wondering why. From what I see, using USB flash drives have some benefits: Cheaper than…
Craig Younkins
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