Two things I hate about “dd” (and I’ve been using it for decades) :
- so easy to output to the wrong device - now that’s a user mistake for sure - but Balena Etcher asks a bunch of things before it does anything destructive - when you press enter on a dd command - only a second later - the damage is mostly done.
- There’s no progress indicator - not only that - but - you need to run sync after dd - because while it says its finished - it REALLY HAS NOT! I’ve run it with --progress in the past - and it finishes - but I run “sync” after that and that runs for minutes…
Not especially - so long as the ISO image is bootable (should have an /isolinux folder in the ISO filesystem).
e.g. write lmde-7-cinnamon-64bit.iso ISO to a USB flash drive at /dev/sdc :
dd if=lmde-7-cinnamon-64bit.iso of=/dev/sdc bs=4M
“bs=4M” is the blocksize… sometimes a higher number will seem to make it go faster - I dunno… that could be anecdotal…
Also - to know what your freshly inserted USB drive is - you can run either “sudo fdisk -l” or “sudo lsblk” - I find the output from the latter easier to follow…
Note : you ALWAYS use the device, not any of the partitions - when flashing an ISO onto other media - i.e.
╰─➤ lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda 8:0 0 465.8G 0 disk
├─sda1 8:1 0 512M 0 part /boot/firmware
└─sda2 8:2 0 465.3G 0 part /
sdb 8:16 0 5.5T 0 disk
└─sdb1 8:17 0 5.5T 0 part /mnt/BUNGER00
zram0 253:0 0 9.5G 0 disk [SWAP]
if I was going to write to the 2nd disk - it would be “/dev/sda” not “/dev/sdb1” - having said that - there maybe occasions when you want output dd to a specific partition - but - not when flashing a bootable ISO to a USB thumb drive…