[HowTo] Write a Manjaro ISO to an USB stick with dd

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1

Difficulty: ★★☆☆☆

This is a tutorial how to write an ISO file correctly to an USB stick.

  1. Download the ISO and the checksum file.

  2. First, verify the checksum:

    sha256sum -c manjaro-de-version-date-kernel.iso.sha256

    It should print a line which says “OK”.
    If it’s not okay, it might be a bad download, so download it again.

  3. Print out the checksum, we’ll need it later on:

    sha256sum manjaro-de-version-date-kernel.iso

e839f496181159bfcfa81524a4c4ec839e4ee7ab2788db7467db15a7860d5be1 manjaro-kde-24.1.0-241001-linux610.iso

  1. Plug in your USB stick.

  2. Check the device name it got associated with:

    ls -l /dev/disk/by-id | grep usb

    […] usb-Flash_USB_Disk_37271228A5E0216322818-0:0 → …/…/XdA

  3. Start the write process with dd:

    sudo dd if=manjaro.iso of=/dev/XdA bs=1M oflag=sync status=progress

    For old and slow USB2 sticks you can use a lower block size (bs) value like 128K;
    for faster sticks you can use 4M.

  4. You get a confirmation when the transfer has been finished:
    xxx bytes (yyy MB, zzz MiB) copied, … s, … MB/s

  5. Now you can check whether the file has been correctly copied to the stick:

    sudo dd if=/dev/XdA iflag=count_bytes count=xxx | sha256sum

    Adjust the count parameter xxx to represent the number of bytes written which you
    get from the confirmation above in point 7.
    xxx bytes (yyy MB, zzz MiB) copied, … s, … MB/s
    dc7427636040e9469861251858aae820c2ae16cc

  6. Compare the checksum with the one you got in step 3, if they match, you’re good to go!

Notes:

a) It’s recommended also to check the signature of the ISO with gpg.
This does not only verifies the integrity, but also the authenticity.

b) Instead of writing to /dev/XdA, you can also write to /dev/disk/by-id/usb-xxx (see point 5). This helps to avoid confusion, especially if you have lots of devices.

21 Likes
2

Or you could use etcher.

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Sure, but (and that is a big BUT):

$ pacman -Si etcher | grep -i size
Download Size   : 65,57 MiB
Installed Size  : 216,55 MiB

SUSE Studio Imagewriter (imagewriter) is another graphical utility and a lot lighter:

$ pacman -Si imagewriter | grep -i size
Download Size   : 112,05 KiB
Installed Size  : 296,00 KiB
5 Likes
4

Another tool with GUI: mintstick

pacman -Qi mintstick | grep -i size
Installed Size  : 112,48 KiB
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5

I am not so sure if I follow your point about the size of the packages. Why would that matter?

imagewriter is many years old and not maintained anymore.
mintstick is old as well.

etcher is a cross platform application for Linux, MacOS and Windows. That explains the size. It is an electron app.

And it is actively maintained. It is doing a validation of the usb stick after writing the image which imagewriter is not doing for example. And the GUI is a lot nicer than imagewriter for sure.

But anyways, feel free to use whatever tool you see fit.

1 Like
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It certainly doesn’t look like an abandon-ware.

It does what it is designed to do. And it does it well. But to each their own.

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7

:+1:
my go-to image writer!

1 Like
8

I use this: SUSE Studio Imagewriter
Eu uso ele : SUSE Studio Imagewriter

2 Likes
9

After using Etcher for a good while I’ve switched to using popsicle. It has the added features of hash checks, flashing multiple devices and, a command line interface.

2 Likes
10

Gnome disks is my go-to utility for managing all my disk needs – including usb image writing.

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11

This is cool. Didnt know that gnome disks is actually offering this function.

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Also Ventoy is very useful for making multiboot flashdrive just by copying multiple iso to the drive.

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I just switched to usbimager ( from Etcher) on recommendation from somewhere. It is extremely small and light on resources. For multiboot, I used to use MultiBootUsb. Ventoy is much better for me.

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Yes, I’ve had far better, more consistent results with popsicle than I ever did with Etcher (or Rufus on Windows).

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15

I used imagewriter yesterday with KDE minimal and it fails… afterwards I tried dd command and it was successful.

We need some official Manjaro app for that. Dd command can be tricky if you are new in Linux world

16

have a look at the package “isousb”

17

This is great, I wasn’t even aware this image writer exists. Thanks for posting this, its much appreciated. :slight_smile:

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thank you really liked the instructions specially the part wheree you use the disk-by id for safety reasons

19

Nice Tutorial.
I use RosaImageWriter. Here are the links
Linux 64-bit
Linux 32-bit

20

Nice tutorial, thank you. I am trying to get more comfortable with built-in functions like dd rather than installing additional applications to achieve these types of tasks.

1 Like