I am using a Mac, booting in efi mode a Debian 10 live usb that I created. In live mode, I am attempting to create a FreeBSD install usb by downloading it and dd’ing it to another usb stick. Before doing so, I want to make sure my usb stick is zeroed. While zeroing my usb stick I noticed a difference in output from dd when using a capital “X” when referencing the drive /dev/sdX
, and a lower case “x” when referencing the drive /dev/sdx
I cannot find much information on case sensitivity in Debian using the dd command, and what the difference is between sdX
and sdx
when referencing drives.
Why do I get different outputs in the dd command when using of=/dev/sdx
vs. using of=/dev/sdX
?
For example, as referenced in the Imgur pic link, I will use the following example in Debian live:
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc bs=1M conv=noerror status=progress && sync
15618539520 bytes (16 GB, 15 GiB) copied, 1067 s, 14.6 MB/s
dd: error writing ‘/dev/sdC’ : No space left on device
14901+0 records in
14900+0 records out
15623782400 bytes (16 GB, 15 GiB) copied, 1125.46 s, 13.9 MB/s
But if I do the command using of=/dev/sdC
on the same usb drive, I get different results such as in the (2nd) example:
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdC bs=1M conv=noerror status=progress && sync
11725956096 bytes (1.7 GB, 1.6 GiB) copied, 3.3301 s, 575 MB/s
dd: error writing ‘/dev/sdC’ : No space left on device
1825+0 records in
1825+0 records out
1913491456 bytes (1.9 GB, 1.8 GiB) copied, 3.3301 s, 575 MB/s
Could someone please explain this phenomenon to me? What is the difference between the drive /dev/sdC
and /dev/sdc
?
/dev/sdc
is your actual device and/dev/sdC
is a file which did not exist before runningdd
. You're mixing things up between writing conventions and the command you want to run in the end. BTW, it is not a "Debian thing". – Paradox Jul 29 at 3:52