Even if you were to completely fill it up with data 100 times every day:
100 times each day * 30 days in a month = 3.000 writes
3.000 * 12 months in a year = 36.000 writes
So it would last about 3 years. But obviously, you're not writing it to every day, 100 times. Sometimes you're on holiday, sometimes you don't even boot up the computer, sometimes you're sick, etc. And you're also not filling it up completely, so there will be blocks that have barely been touched. Just don't set a swap file or browser cache or anything like that on it.
]]>I finally just zeroed as much of the disk as I thought the ISO might have been written to.
That would shorten the lifespan i think.
]]>sounds interesting, but it would unnecessarily reduce the life of the flash drive.
You mean zeroing out more than just the first 512 bytes? That's not true. I think you're more likely to lose it or have it stolen before blocks would start to give out. 100.000-400.000 writes translate as 50-something years of normal usage. Don't worry about it.
]]>Anyway, Rtfm13's solution sounds interesting, but it would unnecessarily reduce the life of the flash drive. Do you have any better idea?
]]>The Linux Mint drive was formatted successfully with windows 7 but again when i tried to mount the partition in arch, sdc1 mounted with the linux mint label! But the contents were blank. So, somehow the label persisted but everything else vanished.
As for the archlinux flash drive, it too formatted successfully with windows 7, but the partition table was all messed up. I formatted it with gparted and everything was fine again.
Anyway, I'll be sure to stay away from dd for installating any iso on a drive, especially for any drive I intend to use for data too.
]]>I had installed the arch iso on a flash drive using dd a few days back. Today, I was trying to remove that and create a fat32 partition instead.
Gparted came up with the usual recursive partition found error. I clicked on ignore, created a new partition table on the drive and formatted it as fat32, which we'll refer to as sdc1.
While mounting the drive with udevil, i typed sdc instead of sdc1, and to my surprise it mounted as ARCH_201212!
I could list all the files and could even read the contents (of the few ascii files I tried).
I deleted the new fat32 (sdc1) partition with fdisk this time, and created a new partition table, but the same result!
Finally I did
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc bs=512 count=1
But still if I mount sdc, it mounts as ARCH_201212 ...
Currently, all the files are listable but are damaged except a few.
see
./arch/aitab: data
./arch/any/usr-share.fs.sfs: data
./arch/boot/i686/archiso.img: Amiga Workbench
./arch/boot/i686/vmlinuz: data
./arch/boot/memtest: data
./arch/boot/memtest.COPYING: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/archiso.cfg: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/archiso_head.cfg: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/archiso_pxe32.cfg: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/archiso_pxe64.cfg: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/archiso_pxe_32_inc.cfg: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/archiso_pxe_both_inc.cfg: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/archiso_pxe_choose.cfg: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/archiso_sys32.cfg: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/archiso_sys64.cfg: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/archiso_sys_32_inc.cfg: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/archiso_sys_both_inc.cfg: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/archiso_sys_choose.cfg: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/archiso_tail.cfg: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/cat.c32: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/chain.c32: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/cmd.c32: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/config.c32: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/cpuid.c32: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/cpuidtest.c32: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/disk.c32: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/dmitest.c32: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/elf.c32: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/ethersel.c32: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/gfxboot.c32: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/gpxecmd.c32: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/gpxelinux.0: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/gpxelinuxk.0: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/hdt/modalias.gz: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/hdt/pciids.gz: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/hdt.c32: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/host.c32: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/ifcpu.c32: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/ifcpu64.c32: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/ifmemdsk.c32: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/ifplop.c32: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/int18.com: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/kbdmap.c32: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/kontron_wdt.c32: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/linux.c32: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/ls.c32: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/lua.c32: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/mboot.c32: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/memdisk: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/memdump.com: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/meminfo.c32: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/menu.c32: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/pcitest.c32: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/pmload.c32: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/poweroff.com: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/prdhcp.c32: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/pwd.c32: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/pxechain.com: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/pxechn.c32: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/pxelinux.0: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/reboot.c32: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/rosh.c32: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/sanboot.c32: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/sdi.c32: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/splash.png: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/sysdump.c32: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/syslinux.cfg: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/syslinux.com: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/ver.com: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/vesainfo.c32: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/vesamenu.c32: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/vpdtest.c32: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/whichsys.c32: data
./arch/boot/syslinux/zzjson.c32: data
./arch/boot/x86_64/archiso.img: data
./arch/boot/x86_64/vmlinuz: data
./arch/checksum.i686.md5: data
./arch/checksum.x86_64.md5: data
./arch/i686/root-image.fs.sfs: data
./arch/i686/usr-lib-modules.fs.sfs: data
./arch/pkglist.i686.txt: data
./arch/pkglist.x86_64.txt: data
./arch/x86_64/root-image.fs.sfs: data
./arch/x86_64/usr-lib-modules.fs.sfs: data
./EFI/archiso/efiboot.img: data
./EFI/boot/bootx64.efi: data
./EFI/shellx64_v1.efi: MS-DOS executable
./EFI/shellx64_v2.efi: data
./isolinux/boot.cat: data
./isolinux/isohdpfx.bin: data
./isolinux/isolinux.bin: data
./isolinux/isolinux.cfg: data
./loader/entries/archiso-x86_64.conf: ASCII text
./loader/entries/uefi-shell-v1-x86_64.conf: data
./loader/entries/uefi-shell-v2-x86_64.conf: data
./loader/loader.conf: data
By the way, it is not an issue with the arch iso, as I have another flash drive with Linux mint, and it displays the same behaviour.
Has anyone experienced anything similar?
And more importantly how can I remove all traces of the previous data.
]]>