It seems odd that there are no obvious ways to write a disk image to a USB flash drive from a Linux system, when there are so many options for burning images to a CD. I often find myself wanting to run a “Live CD” and using a flash drive instead is both faster and less wasteful.

So we have to resort to low-level tools like dd:

$ sudo dd if=Fedora-17-x86_64-Live-Desktop.iso of=/dev/sdh bs=8M conv=fsync

This is assuming your USB flash drive is the /dev/sdh device; you can find out with dmesg or a tool like GNOME’s “Disks” utility.

So this works, but there’s not a whole lot of feedback. The dd program is like that. The man page suggests we can get it to print some statistics by sending the USR1 signal to it. Hokay. Need to open a new terminal for this!

$ pkill -USR1 ^dd$

Cool! But wouldn’t it be nice if dd had a progress bar or somesuch, without requiring a new terminal just to get some feedback? Enter pv.

$ sudo yum install pv
$ pv Fedora-17-x86_64-Live-Desktop.iso | sudo dd of=/dev/sdh bs=8M conv=fsync

Enjoy!