[NTLUG:Discuss] DD Assistance?

[Fred Hensley]

I have received a vendor-generated image file (dsclinux-32.img) provided
for installation onto a proprietary 32MB flash disk module.  The
bytes-per-sector for the flash module appears to be 1K.  The image file
is supposed to create a complete ext2 formatted tiny linux system for an
embedded single board computer (SBC). 

The command syntax the SBC manufacturer recommends using is as follows:

dd if=dsclinux-32.img of=/dev/hdc bs=1k

However, I wish to instead write this image to a standard Sandisk 32MB
or 64MB compact flash module.  My hotplug system recognizes the compact
flash as /dev/sdb, and my newly created linux partition is /dev/sdb1.  I
used fdisk to create a 32MB linux partition, and also make it boot-able.

Once the partition is successfully created, I use the following command:

dd if=dsclinux-32.img ibs=1k of=/dev/sdb1 obs=512

Note I set the output bytes-per-sector to 512 since that follows what
Sandisk reports their compact flash to be.  The dd command completes
without error, but I am not able to successfully mount the drive
afterwards using the command "mount -t ext2 /dev/sdb1 /media/cflash".
The error reported is that the filesystem is not recognized.

I have also tried variations of running "mke2fs /dev/sdb1" **after** the
successful partion and **before** using "dd".  One other variation of dd
I attempted added the parameter "cbs=512", but no success...

Anyone notice anything obvious (or slippery) I am missing here?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Fred Hensley

p.s.  My linux distribution is Ubuntu 5.10 breezy on an x86 platform.
the SBC target is also an x86 compliant platform.