♬ Hello dd my old friend
I’ve come sudo with you again ♬
this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2025
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Privacy
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Hello cat or cp or pv... Or anything else that works with files
Huh this is news to me. Wonder why dd has been the defacto standard in guides everywhere for the past 15-20+ years
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That's interesting, apparently it was mentioned on github but nothing seems to have changed in the end
https://github.com/balena-io/etcher/issues/3784
Haven't used that software in a long time but maybe there's an opt-out somewhere during runtime? Although I don't see why a user needs to be required to opt out of nonsense like this when just writing firmware to a USB disk.
Only ever touched balenaEtcher when some project or distro recommended it. Overall prefer Rufus for this sort of thing when working on Windows.
I've used Sardu on Windows for making multi-iso bootable USB sticks a long time ago in the past, but I'd admittedly never looked at their ToS or Privacy Policy. My use case was slapping some live boot antivirus scanners, data recovery tools, and one or two lightweight liveboot-Linux ISOs on one USB as a portable toolkit.
When I'm making anything else from Windows, I've always stuck with Rufus. Had never heard of BalenaEtcher before now.
I"m horrible with names of programs and mess with a lot of junk comps switching out OS's and just tinkering around so I'm always using crazy utility programs. BalenaEtcher is used in a lot of tutorials or guides for installations, I think recently both Elementary OS and even Ubuntu had instructions pointing towards BalenaEtcher.
I never thought it was a great program, it was finicky to use and errors out quickly multiple times. Looking back I saw the signs, weird new program being promoted above other "well established" burn programs, ads, and now scrolling down their webpage it's just a bunch of promotional subscription bullshit. I think I just threw up in my mouth a little bit looking at the "balenacloud" and "balenasense", like if they're collecting your data through etcher then all of that shit is probably compromised. Another fucking google wannabe corp.
dd
Never understood why you would use anything else. It's in coreutils!!!
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It is indeed the best way, but somehow I am still anxious using this command, even after flashing countless USB drives 😅
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If you need a FOSS, cross platform GUI for bootable USB sticks, Raspberry Pi Imager is a really good solution.
It is mainly used to flash SD cards for RPIs, but also you can burn any ISO on any support with it.
I used to use the fedora media writer but the RPi imager software is so easy I switched
Is no one aware of Fedora Media Writer? It's FOSS and the most trustworthy ISO burning software in existence. It's only issue is that its named as if it is written only for producing Fedora bootable media. It works for everything.
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Sudo dd if=tails.iso of=/dev/sdb
bash: Sudo: command not found
Lol, nice one
In my early days of Linux, I royally fucked up a USB thumb drive (back when they were expensive) using dd and as a result do not trust myself with it.
I would use Hannah Montana Linux if it was the only GUI option to burn a USB ISO.
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i still don't understand why anyone would use etcher. it's an electron wrapper over dd. it's 80MB where rufus is 1.5. when it appeared there were already other programs that did its job better.
I like clicking buttons that have a text on them saying what they do instead of trying to memorize a gajillion terminal commands and flags where I have to enter more commands and flags to see what they do.
plus it's some some sanity checks like not showing you your system drives. Or warning you when the drive you are about to nuke is suspiciously large and maybe not the usb drive you actually want to use.
This is basically the main feature. Stopping you from fatfingering the wrong drive
On Windows, Rufus is just as easy to use tho. And on Linux, there is Gnome Disks.
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Friendship ended with Balena
Now Rufus is my new best friend
I tried belenaEtcher once on my Mac... And it seemed to me more like a spyware than an actual software, I was a bit confused and never used it again.
Generally Ventoy is better than both. Choose a dedicated flash storage, flash Ventoy to it, then click and drag as many ISO's as can fit on your drive and you can boot from any one of them at any time.
Much better than Etcher or Rufus, IMO.
Just use dd. It's not that hard. You pass it 2 arguments: if= the file you want to flash, and of= the destination. If you're feeling fancy, pass in some status=progress. And don't forget to prepend it with sudo. That's it.
I just tried this the other day and was unable to boot from the USB. Any chance you could shed some light on what I might have screwed up?
The command was:
dd if=fedora.iso of=/dev/sdc bs=4M status=progress
The USB stick was not mounted and the fedora image was verified. The command completed successfully but I couldn't boot from it. When I used fedora writer to burn the same image to the same USB stick it booted no problem.
Edit: spelling & capitalization
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Linux mint factory USB creator just right click and make bootable.
Yet another reason for people to run a default prompt (deny until prompt answer) firewall.
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Not using Ventoy in 2025?
Ventoy uses several blobs without any instructions of compiling them yourself?
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Honestly, if you're using Windows, then you most likely already sent any and all of your secrets to Microsoft anyway. Including that you installed Tails.
Not used it since I discovered this nonsense. Shows how seriously they take security. https://github.com/balena-io/etcher/issues/3410
i still had issues using 150MB electron based bloated and heavy software instead of rufus, not that it worked for me anyway
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