Required Items

• pv. Don't use dd. While it will often work, dd is a 50+ year old command, uses archaic syntax and provides little to no feedback on what it is doing.
• An ISO image (usually .iso, but the process will also work for .raw.xz, and some other archived images).

Steps

1. Insert a removable USB drive, and ensure that there is at least one partition large enough for the ISO image.
2. Use lsblk to check the drive name & partitions (very often a removable drive will be something like /dev/sda or /dev/sdb).

lsblk -f ## List block devices

## Look for something like the partition tree below

NAME        FSTYPE FSVER LABEL UUID  
sda                                   
└─sda1                                                                             

3. If the drive has no partition, cfdisk is a user-friendly TUI tool that can create drive partitions.

sudo cfdisk /dev/sda
## Ensure changes are written before exiting the application

4. Write the ISO image to a partition on the drive:

sudo pv arch.iso -o /dev/sda1

Optional Improvements

• --sync or -Y will use fdatasync to synchronize the buffer cache after every write operation. This will sometimes improve the accuracy of pv's progress bar when writing data to a slow disk (like a USB stick).

sudo pv arch.iso --sync -o /dev/sda1

## or

sudo pv arch.iso -Y -o /dev/sda1

• --stats or -v will show the transfer rate in bytes per second.

sudo pv arch.ios --sync --stats -o /dev/sda1