On Sun, Jun 9, 2013 at 5:23 PM, Alfredo Palhares masterkorp@masterkorp.netwrote: Hello,

So I was creating a archlinux usb bootable drive:

[root@masterkorp-laptop Downloads]# dd bs=4M if=archlinux-2013.06.01-dual.iso of=/dev/sdb 130+1 records in 130+1 records out 548405248 bytes (548 MB) copied, 0.964976 s, 568 MB/s

I was like WOW, this was too fast! But nothing ever gets written to the pen drive. To add to the weird factor, a dd to dev/sdb1 (partition) works as it should, slowly. But then ofcourse the iso gets unbootable.

The md5sum on the iso is correct. I tried with diferent pen drives.

Please, any suggestions is welcome.

-- Regards, Alfredo Palhares

When I first learned DD, to create bootable disks, 1M was the suggested size because you could manage to miswrite with something larger. The caution was: "Use 1M to restrict your speed so that it writes properly" which I never actually understood, but never had a problem with. Only recently have I seen the suggestion to use 4M, but always with 1M as the fallback option if it doesn't work.