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[Gaz511]

Having read through Helen Pixles post "I made the bootable USB" and the problems encountered with Etcher and Unetbootin plus the fact you have to be very careful if you use the dd command. Could I suggest another option USBImager which I found via the video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xuP1GQLPpI

Its very light weight, open source, very easy to use and over the last twelve months I have had no problems with it at all.
Where to find it and how to install are all covered in the video.

[Brian000]

hi Gaz511,

I've never used Etcher, so this may not be a complete alternative...

My goto is "Disks" (Gnome-Disk-Utility) - for writing iso file to usb.

www.wiki.gnome.org/App/Disks

[Keith]

You link doesn't work, Brian. 

Although specifically for Fedora, this link might be useful: https://fedoramagazine.org/how-to-make-a-live-usb-stick-using-gnome-disks/

Keith

[Brian000]

i'll copy and paste this time

https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Disks

[steve57]

I really wish I could add something useful to this thread, but I can't. I've used both Balena Etcher and Rufus on Windows machines to make bootable USB's, and on Linux I've used the image writer that comes with MX, and the image writer that comes with Mint. I may have also done it on Manjaro but can't quite remember. Thing is, it's very rare that I have any problems, and I don't really know why that is. Have I just been lucky?

It's quite evident from various forums that a lot of people do have difficulties, and I'm not sure why. One occasion that something wouldn't boot I had used a very "well worn" USB stick that had been used countless times previously. I swapped it for one that I knew had very little use and everything was fine, so that may be worth considering. I also stick to well known brands, such as Kingston, and avoid generic "no name" stuff.

The other thing of course is the checksums, which it appears a lot of people don't bother checking. This came up in a post I put on the MX forum, and I was informed that of all those that had downloaded MX from Sourceforge, only about 3% had bothered to download the checksum file. It's no good blaming the image writer if you've got a corrupted ISO file.

[eionmac]

One of the reasons, is that an 'image writer' is usually not in the set of programs downloaded as a minimum in any distro. For example in openSUSE it has to be specifically searched for in the repositories and downloaded , it is not automatically installed.