Write the USB stick

Write the image raw. Never use a tool that “extracts” the ISO onto a FAT-formatted stick.

Windows or macOS

Use a raw-image writer such as balenaEtcher, which verifies the stick after writing.

Linux, with dd

Caution

dd writes to whatever device you name — naming the wrong one destroys that disk. Go slowly.

1. Find the stick. Plug it in, then:

   lsblk -d -o NAME,SIZE,MODEL,SERIAL,TRAN,RM

   Your stick is the line with TRAN = usb, RM = 1 and the size of your stick, for example sdb 29.5G USB Flash Drive … usb 1. Never pick nvme0n1, sda if it is your internal disk, or anything with RM = 0. Unplug the stick and run the command again: the line that disappears is the stick.

2. Unmount everything on it (replace sdX with your stick, e.g. sdb):

   for p in /dev/sdX?*; do sudo umount "$p" 2>/dev/null; done

3. Write the image to the whole device — not a partition such as sdX1:

   sudo dd if=ArkynOS-2.1.0-amd64.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4M conv=fsync status=progress
   sync

4. Check what was written. This compares exactly the ISO’s length and prints nothing on success:

   sudo cmp -n "$(stat -c %s ArkynOS-2.1.0-amd64.iso)" ArkynOS-2.1.0-amd64.iso /dev/sdX && echo "stick OK"