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Comment by koito17 | Hacker News Reader

For the specific case of "burning" some Linux distro's installer to a USB drive, I've always found those .img files much easier to deal with than ISO files, simply because a single dd(1) invocation is all I need to "burn" the image onto my drive.

I figure this is probably the vast majority of people who install Linux from a physical device rather than network booting. (I have dealt with PXE about a decade ago but I can't figure out how to use it anymore.)

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That's the point of the "hybrid-iso" format; you can dd(1) it to a USB drive and it will boot, and you can burn it to a CD/DVD and it will boot.

P.S. there's no reason to use dd(1) for this; cp(1) works just as well and is usually faster, since it can autoconfigure the block size.

Recently discovered ventoy: https://www.ventoy.net/

Loads a boot menu so you can pick from a number of .iso files dynamically. Just copy them to the first partition of the drive. Drag and drop if you want. Much more efficient than clobbering the filesystem with a dedicated tool every time.

Heck, I use shell redirects. Something like this:

    < /path/to/imagefile > /path/to/device

Oddly, I've just realized this works fine in ZSH but not BASH :) ZSH copies, BASH makes a 0-byte file/writes nothing

I guess I've been lucky not caring about the block size

To make a windows bootable USB you need windows.

Doing dd (or cp) will make a device that boots the installer but ultimately will fail to install.

it's possible, just not straightforward this worked for me a few days ago https://nixaid.com/bootable-usb-windows-linux/

WoeUSB-ng worked last time I needed a Windows install USB: https://github.com/WoeUSB/WoeUSB-ng

Cool, I will soon need to replace my hard drive, I can give it a try.

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