Dr. J Posted March 16, 2016 Share Posted March 16, 2016 (edited) After a long time using different programs to write .iso files to USB or CD (all of which ran into miscellaneous problems at some stage), I came across, in a seemingly unexplored part of Wikipedia, a mention of a handy little command line tool called dd. Apparently it's included in the base packages of pretty much every Linux distro out there. The syntax is such... sudo dd if=inputfile.iso of=/dev/sd* bs=4M; sync Where (just to state the obvious) 'inputfile.iso' is the name of the file (in the current directory) you wish to write, and '/dev/sd*' is the USB device, which must be unmounted (not "safely removed"), and the 'bs=' part is the sise of blocks to be processed (default is 512 bytes, which could take a while). I just figured I'd put this out there, because it doesn't exactly seem to be advertised, and I don't know how well known it is. I've used it twice so far with nothing but success. FOOTNOTE: This comes with the standard health warning of "Your USB drive will be wiped and re-partitioned." Edited March 16, 2016 by Dr. J 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted March 16, 2016 Share Posted March 16, 2016 I am kind of surprised that you have not used it before since that is the only way to get the Archlinux iso onto a usb stick due to syslinux being overwritten by unetbootin and others: https://wiki.archlin..._media#Using_dd BTW they added a status option to the last update of dd. It is a very useful tool that I have been using for many years.. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dr. J Posted March 16, 2016 Author Share Posted March 16, 2016 I used imageUSB (running on windows 7) to write the Arch iso, which is one of those "sometimes work, sometimes won't" programs. For some reason I could never unetbootin to work (as in start up properly). I was quite happy to discover dd, as it's the last thing I need to do a complete Linux switch-over. I still have Windows, but everything is out of date by about a year, and I haven't booted into it since I installed Arch (apart from when I needed to write or extract a disc image) . I'll probably overwrite it with Slackware and use the two distros intermittently, I've been thinking about doing that for a while. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted March 16, 2016 Share Posted March 16, 2016 The reason unetbootin will not work with Archlinux (and derivatives) is that it overwrites syslinux which is required to boot Archlinux. UNetbootin can be used on any Linux distribution or Windows to copy your iso to a USB device. However, Unetbootin overwrites syslinux.cfg, so it creates a USB device that does not boot properly. For this reason, Unetbootin is not recommended -- please use dd or one of the other methods discussed in this topic. https://wiki.archlin...sing_UNetbootin 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dr. J Posted March 16, 2016 Author Share Posted March 16, 2016 Thanks for the info. I guess I won't be needing unetbootin for anything anymore though. *Que an in-depth study of dd's man pages.* Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted March 16, 2016 Share Posted March 16, 2016 Yup, dd is an awesome tool for sure 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jimg Posted March 16, 2016 Share Posted March 16, 2016 I usually use dcfldd - basically dd with progress updates. The last update for this utility was ~10 years ago, but it still works correctly. Using bs=1M will make it provide more updates. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted March 16, 2016 Share Posted March 16, 2016 I usually use dcfldd - basically dd with progress updates. The last update for this utility was ~10 years ago, but it still works correctly. Using bs=1M will make it provide more updates. The last version of dd added progress. To use it, simply add status=progress to the command after the /dev/sd* device and before sync. For instance: dd bs=4M if=/path/to/linux.iso of=/dev/sdg status=progress && sync Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sunrat Posted March 17, 2016 Share Posted March 17, 2016 dd is also a recommended way to write an image for Debian. Unetbootin has been known to cause problems. https://www.debian.org/CD/faq/#write-usb 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted March 17, 2016 Share Posted March 17, 2016 dd is also a recommended way to write an image for Debian. Unetbootin has been known to cause problems. https://www.debian.o.../faq/#write-usb Interesting. I was unaware of unetbootin affecting others distros besides Archlinux. I always thought Unetbootin was safe and that it was simply an issue with archlinux and syslinux.cfg. I wonder if debian is using syslinux as their installation media bootloader like arch does? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sunrat Posted March 17, 2016 Share Posted March 17, 2016 ...I wonder if debian is using syslinux as their installation media bootloader like arch does? isolinux https://debian-handbook.info/browse/stable/sect.installation-steps.html 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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