I was trying to make my usb into a usb.img

basically, I got a 2GB usb witha 350MB debian live distro I made on there

I want to turn that into a usb.img

is that how you do it?

I used DD command:

so, it unfortunately made a 2GB img

How do I get it to only make a img of whats on the USB
like when you get/download a regular usb.img??

thanks

Make a partition the size of the image, then run the dd command again on that partition. You may want to add bs=512 to the end, that's how the Slackware USB image is created. This may not work properly though, with the Slackware USB install image you have to use the entire thumb drive, regardless of how large it is. At least that's how it is done according to the official notes.

You need to specify the count parameter. Its best if count is expressed in bytes for accuracy.

mount your usb stick and do this -

It will output you a big number on the left side.

i suggest you keep a 1 M = 1048576 bytes margin to avoid any errors.

Add the above number to the number shown by 'du'.

Then do this -

OK

du gave me

379668590
+
1048576
=
484526190

and so I did
but that still makes a 2GB img!?

so what now??

it should make a img file of exactly the spce taken up by whats on usb...
how do I do that and have it be bootable?

I just noticed, you have the if and of backwards. It should be dd if=503box.img of=/dev/sda count={number}

what?

I'm not trying to Install a usb.img to my usb

I'm trying to Make a usb.img from my usb

Ohh, I read that wrong, sorry. You could use partimage to create an image of the usb drive minus the unused space.

really?

see, I'm trying to duplicate how a Debian Live usb.img is made
http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/re.../i386/usb-hdd/

basically, the Debian Live .img's label your USB "DEBIAN_LIVE"
and it is fat32 inside with syslinux etc

and it only takes up so much space, however big it is

and then you use Gparted to format and label the remainging unallocated space
as live-rw

Have you tried manually copying the files into a directory outside of the drive, then turning that directory into a .img? I am downloading the small debian.img from the link you gave, I will mount it and take a look at how it's set up, if it's just a standard Linux system converted into a .img you should have no problems doing what I just suggested.

Edit: I did a quick search on Debian live image and found this on the Debian wiki. That goes through making a live image containing whatever parts of the system you want, you can use it to replicate your current image. But I would still try out the partimage method, it creates an image of the drive without the free space, so you would have what you were originally trying to do with dd.

Edit2: I just looked at the file, as long as your current USB image is able to boot you will be able to copy the contents into a directory and then make an image of them and stick it back on a disk.

well

you can't create a .img file from a folder
or at least not with dd

it says its a directory and quits

There must be a way right?

Well you would have to make the image with the lh_{whatever} commands, they are in the Debian wiki on creating live images. I should have probably mentioned that before. Have you tried just using partimage yet?

dd if=/dev/sda of=503box.img bs=387973120 count=1

I gave you around 25MBs extra just in case there is a little more data beyond 350MB.

Hope this helps.