Ext4 formatted live USB

I think this might be because it is an iso9660 formatted live image as i have def formatted lots of other usb drives as ext4 and then DD’d other live distro’s to them and they have stayed ext4 after the DD finished - and they’ve booted. Although i think i might have seen other distro’s overwrite the usb drives formatting … i guess i must have ignored it though.

Or maybe it’s “the way” (as someone mentioned in an earlier post) that the live image was created - i REALLY don’t know enough (anything!) about making live images.

There is no reason for format a device before using dd on it. dd will overwrite it.

The format you are seeing after the dd operation is whatever format the image you dd’ed to it was to begin with.

Said differently, if the image was ext4 formatted than the result of the dd will be ext4 regardless of what it was before.

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Thanks for your reply @dalto

I do realise that there is no need to format before the DD.

However, a long time ago, with another distro, i noticed that the live usb produced by the dd was fat (of some flavour). As i mentioned, i would prefer, feel a little safer, if a casual Windoze user “saw” anything of mine as unreadable, so i tried formatting the usb drive before the dd and was delighted when the resulting live drive booted and yet was still ext[whatever i had used]. And i’ve done the same ever since. I’ve got and old copy of knoppix (pre P–T extinction i think) you can try it on that if you want. That’s the oldest distro i retain & TBH i did make that iso myself from an old CD (yes, all 699Meg of it) so it might not be a good test subject.

@ricklinux i didn’t have a “problem”. I just noticed that the formatting had changed. Obv for anyone who doesn’t care about what format it is then they should def not be formatting before they DD as DD can, i understand, handle most issues it might come across with a pen drive.

I’m just like being obtuse

  • i was curious when i was ( much ) younger!

Since it was a long time ago I can’t say exactly what you saw but if you dd a disk image directly to a block device it will never retain the previous formatting.