MediaWriter VS SimpleDiskImager

According to the official Github page for Fedora Media Writer, it does:

Fedora Media Writer's repository contains this document on the subject: https://github.com/FedoraQt/MediaWriter/blob/main/CRYPTOGRAPHY.md

That's because it has been fixed already. The translatable string changed in this commit, and the translation tool apparently automatically mapped the old translation to it with a "Needs Editing" tag.

PS: for the ones using the official Fedora Media Writer to create a bootable USB from an .ISO... There's currently a new version in the making which is supposed to launch together with Fedora 36 - you can get preview-builds here: https://github.com/FedoraQt/MediaWriter/releases and some additional info on it here: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[email protected]/thread/L2QQJ5CNJOQ7ZGKXPUPVZ7DU5UJ6BVFO/

It is: https://github.com/FedoraQt/MediaWriter/releases

Fedora Media Writer works fine for me. https://github.com/FedoraQt/MediaWriter

For anyone complaining that there is no nice GUI for dd on Linux and macOS, I recently discovered Fedora Media Writer [1] which works great for this job. Despite it’s name, it can be used with any ISO just like dd.

[1] https://github.com/FedoraQt/MediaWriter

FWIW, the Fedora Media Writer works with any distribution's images, just select the "custom image" option and point it to whatever ISO you have.

Rufus is great for writing Windows ISOs to thumb drives. Sometimes it tries to be too smart though. In particular I had trouble writing a SmartOS disk image successfully.

I tried writing something[1] that would be a little smarter than Win32 Disk Imager. That is, it will adjust EFI partition labeling. Otherwise it will just write the image. After some experimentation that is what was needed to get a SmartOS disk image to boot on my old laptop.

It sounds obvious in retrospect, but you can’t use something like dd to write invalid disk partitioning data and expect it to boot. EFI expects there to be a header at the beginning and end of the disk. Furthermore, I can’t try to “optimize” my disk image writer by skipping zeroed sectors and expect everything to work out fine. Without knowledge of the file system format, leaving sectors uncleared causes all kinds of fun data corruption.

[1]: https://github.com/AustinWise/SimpleDiskImager