I went and bought another flash USB today and set it up, it was fine.
I did as you suggested but rather as expected it didn't work. The transfer was of about 1GB from partition 1 of the ok system ( sdd1 ) to the bad one ( sdc1 ). SYNC took about 15 seconds so definately necessary. As expected it turned it into a 1GB device. I haven't looked in detail but the files seem fine, the disk label was transferred as well, it doesn't show as I changed the label of the ok one afterwards. Bad one: according to fdisk the format is FAT16, as it was before the transfer, but gparted has it as FAT16 before the transfer and F32 afterwrds. When booting there was just a blank screen.
fdisk, mount & two ls -l -R
Code:
felix@emma:~$
felix@emma:~$ sudo fdisk -l
...
Disk /dev/sdc: 3869 MB, 3869544448 bytes
105 heads, 18 sectors/track, 3998 cylinders, total 7557704 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0009020b
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdc1 2048 7557119 3777536 6 FAT16
Disk /dev/sdd: 3999 MB, 3999268864 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 486 cylinders, total 7811072 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xc3072e18
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdd1 * 63 2152709 1076323+ b W95 FAT32
/dev/sdd2 2152710 7807589 2827440 b W95 FAT32
...
I emailed the supplier today about whether it was a solvable problem, though there's not a lot of consolation in being well paid doing up a parcel and then posting it.
-------------------
I was just about to send this when I decided to check something else. The flags ( BOOT in this case ) hadn't been transferred by dd, is this what you would expect? I was expecting the flag to be transferred. The working version had BOOT set on partition 1, but not the copy. When I manually set the boot flag it fixed the problem. Booted ok and files seem ok.
I'll mark as solved when I'm more sure it works.
I'm still surprised that your method worked, well, with a tiny bit of help, and yet the dd'ing the zeros didn't.
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