So you have a live USB stick that you want to make a copy of. Well good for you!

Put it in and do the following check procedure.

df -h

You should get a message returned looking something like this:

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1              36G   34G  197M 100% /
varrun                248M  120K  248M   1% /var/run
varlock               248M     0  248M   0% /var/lock
udev                  248M   96K  248M   1% /dev
devshm                248M     0  248M   0% /dev/shm
lrm                   248M   34M  214M  14% /lib/modules/2.6.22-16-generic/volatile
/dev/sdb1             299G  277G   22G  93% /media/LACIE
/dev/sdc2             1,1G   65M  963M   7% /media/casper-rw
/dev/sdc1             799M  702M   56M  93% /media/kubuntu810

It is the two last we have an interest in as these represent the live distro, try doing the df -h without having the stick mounted if you don't know the names of the mountpoints.

Now unmount the USB stick.

Once unmounted you are going to use the infamous dd command ( DO NOT DO THIS UNLESS YOU ARE ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN WHAT YOU ARE DOING AS YOU CAN WREAK HAVOC WITH YOUR SYSTEM IF YOU MESS UP, DOUBLE CHECK AND TRIPLE CHECK EVERY DD COMMAND YOU MAKE!!! )

Got that ? Okay now type:

sudo dd if=/dev/sdc of=/media/LACIE/sorted/own/isos/kubuntu810.usb.iso

Once you launch the above command you will get a message saying.

[sudo] password for YOUR USER NAME:

YOUR USER NAME=the name of the currently logged in user.

You type the password and wait, after a while something like the below text should appear in your CLI

3915776+0 records in
3915776+0 records out
2004877312 bytes (2,0 GB) copied, 130,009 seconds, 15,4 MB/s

If that happens you have successfully copied the contents of the live USB to your harddrive.

Getting it back onto another stick is a relatively simple affair simply type the following:

sudo dd if=kubuntu810.usb.iso /dev/THE NAME OF THE USB STICK

And voila you have a live Kubuntu distro on a stick (or whatever live distro you choose)

 
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