This is one of those things that SystemD can make more complicated. When you DD a disk image on something it rewrites the disk header, which can cause SystemD to reparse the header and do some weird stuff with the device that causes the write to fail or get corrupted. Etcher works around that problem.

That said, the more lightweight "Disk Image Creator" also gets around this problem without dragging in an entire self contained browser.

What is this "systemd" you speak of? Getting in between a man-as-root and his dev nodes? Sounds most un-unixlike.

It's IBM's way of embrace-extend-extinguish'ing freedesktop

> That said, the more lightweight "Disk Image Creator" also gets around this problem without dragging in an entire self contained browser.

Exactly my point. Also that self contained browser hides a spyware (telemetry without notice and opt out), so illegal in the EU.

ddrescue always works.

> You usually don't even need dd, plain cat <iso >device is fine

Definitely not. In fact, even dd is insufficient unless you use os specific flags to flush the disk cache, otherwise your stick might be corrupted. Read about the fdatasync syscall.

Okay, so cat && sync

May not work, OS dependent. According to POSIX "sync" flushes the file system level buffer cache of opened files, and not necessarily the block device cache inside the kernel. (Eg. "sync" flushes devfs under /dev, so updates the /dev/sda directory entry, but maybe not the block cache of the (8,0) device.)

There's a good reason why the dd command exists, believe me.

FYI: https://linux.die.net/man/2/sync syscall is not the same as https://linux.die.net/man/2/fsync syscall.

ddrescue worked for me better than dd.

For what it's worth, probably not much, openbsd still has raw devices /dev/rsd1a vs /dev/sd1a(the block device) while it looks like linux made them all block devices (unless opened a special way O_DIRECT) and freebsd(as best I can tell) made all devices raw. https://docs-archive.freebsd.org/doc/11.2-RELEASE/usr/local/...

So, on openbsd, make sure you use the raw device when writing images with dd, and in my experience you want to use dd because the block size on cat is too small. dd bs=64k if=image.file of=/dev/rsd2c (c on obsd is entire disk)