Obscure error: dd: failed to open: No medium found

This blog post was published 8 years ago and may or may not have aged well. While reading please keep in mind that it may no longer be accurate or even relevant.

I got this error message when I wanted to use dd to copy a raw image to a MicroSD card. You will see this message if you have unmounted the card with a file manager like Nautilus.

The fix:

Unmount the card via the terminal:

umount /dev/sdd1

The dd command will work now.

Another variant of this error can be seen when using bmaptool:

bmaptool: ERROR: cannot open destination file '/dev/sdd': [Errno 123] No medium found: '/dev/sdd'

Keywords: usbkde