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Questions tagged [usb-flash-drive]

USB Flash Drives are portable USB drives that rely upon flash storage, also known as pen drives or USB sticks.

2234 questions
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23 answers

How do I place a bootable ISO on a USB drive?

What's the best way of placing a bootable ISO on a USB drive, such that the drive is bootable? ISOs such as a live Linux preview disk, Windows installation ISO, etc.
Justin White
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188
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11 answers

Can Windows tell me what is using my USB drive?

Being the good citizen I am, I left-click on the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon in my taskbar, and select my USB drive to dismount. Then I get the message: Windows can't stop your Generic volume device because it is in use. Close any programs or…
PP.
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4 answers

How to delete a partition on a USB drive?

I have a USB drive that I accidentally partitioned when trying to put Ubuntu on it. It's a 16 GB Kingston flash drive but it is now split to two partitions, 7.30 GB each. How do I combine the two partitions into one? I have tried Disk Management in…
Megaeverything
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133
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9 answers

What is the danger of inserting and browsing an untrusted USB drive?

Suppose someone wants me to copy some files to their USB stick. I'm running fully-patched Windows 7 x64 with AutoRun disabled (via Group Policy). I insert the USB drive, open it in Windows Explorer and copy some files to it. I do not run or view any…
EM0
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126
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8 answers

How to check the physical health of a USB stick in Linux?

How to check the health status of a USB stick? How do I know that a USB is broken beyond repair, or repairable?
valpa
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125
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13 answers

How to speed up rsync between two local disks?

I'm running rsync to sync a directory onto my external USB HDD. It's about 150 gigs of data. 50000+ files I would guess. It's running it's first sync at the moment, but its copying files at a rate of only 1-5 MB/s. That seems incredibly slow for a…
Jake Wilson
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100
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9 answers

How do I burn an ISO on a USB drive on Mac OS X?

what's the best way to get an ISO "burned" to a USB stick on a Mac? Restoring using Disk Utility does not work. The ISO is ubuntu mini.iso. It is the minimalist install ISO for installing ubuntu. It needs to be bootable on a PC. I am trying to…
Jason Marcell
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99
votes
9 answers

How do I fix my USB drive to get its original 8GB size back?

My USB drive used to be originally 8GB when I bought it. I'm trying to reformatted in Windows 7 by right clicking on the drive and selecting Format.... But the capacity only shows 250MB. Is there something I can do to get the original size back?…
fent
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80
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7 answers

Using UDF on a USB flash drive

After failing to copy a file bigger than 4G to my 8G USB flash drive, I formatted it as ext3. While this is working fine for me so far, it will cause problems if I want to use it to copy files to someone which does not use Linux. I am thinking of…
CesarB
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78
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3 answers

I washed my USB drive. Any long-term risks?

I accidentally left a USB flash drive in my clothes, which was then washed with my laundry. This was a colored load, hot water. The drive survived just fine and was very clean. All data was still there, and I see no physical damage. Am I risking any…
user95156
76
votes
11 answers

Automatically mount external drives to /media/LABEL on boot without a user logged in?

This question is similar, but kind of the opposite of what I want. I want external USB drives to be mounted automatically at boot, without anyone logged in, to locations like /media/
endolith
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72
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6 answers

Why are USB flash drives so much slower than SSDs?

From what I understand, USB flash drives and solid-state drives (SSDs) are based on similar technologies, NAND flash memory. But, USB flash drives are usually quite slow, with a read and write speed of 10-25 MB per second, while SSDs are usually…
Jonas
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68
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3 answers

What's the technical difference between a flash drive and an SSD?

I was just reading a question on backups with flash drives, but I was not quite sure why SSDs would be better than flash drives for backups. To me, solid-state drives look like larger versions of flash drives. But surely there must be something that…
oldmud0
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7 answers

Install Windows 7 from USB flash drive

I have an ISO image of the Windows 7 installation DVD, but I can't burn it to CD or DVD. I have an empty flash drive with plenty of space. Is there any way I can put the ISO image on it and install from it as if it were a CD?
user5828
59
votes
12 answers

How to install Debian from a USB drive?

I've got a shining new x64 laptop running Windows 7 and I want to dual boot Debian stable. I've installed Ubuntu on loads of laptops in the past using a USB drive, but I can't find decent instructions for installing Debian like the Ubuntu…
blokeley
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