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Unetbootin does not recognize my SD card.

Is there any alternative software to write a .iso file to an SD card?

I'm not trying to write a Ubuntu .iso, so Startup Disk Creator wont work..

kiri
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user133173
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1 Answers1

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You can use dd to write the image to any drive. First find out what your SD card is called. sudo fdisk -l lists all storage devices. Find you SD card. It should be called something like /dev/sdx where x is any letter. If you have the name make sure it's partitions are not mounted. Then you can copy the image to the device:

sudo dd if=/path/to/isofile.iso of=/dev/sdx

Be aware that the SD card is overwritten entirely.

WARNING

Be absolutely sure you have the right device name. Otherwise you could accidentally overwrite some other device and its data.

Community
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André Stannek
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    A nickname for dd is "data destroyer" because that's exactly what it will do to anything on the target device, so make certain you've aimed it correctly. I've found it to be the best method, though. – Marc Jan 23 '14 at 04:29
  • I will be damned, but does writing an iso image onto an sdcard make it bootable. Doesn't isos have a joliet fs or something? – Gaurav Joseph Jan 23 '14 at 06:58
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    @GauravJoseph not every ISO is bootable. You can create an ISO from every device so it can have every file system. You basically create a copy of that device. The other way around: if you write an ISO to a SD-card you don't just copy the ISOs file content to it. You really write the whole ISO, including partitions, file systems, flags and boot sectors (if existent). – André Stannek Jan 23 '14 at 08:19
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    You can also use dc3dd to do this, it provides a nice progress report while running. simply substitute dc3dd for dd in the above command. – Elder Geek Apr 28 '15 at 20:22
  • Append status=progress at the end to see what's up - this comment is for myself for when I'll be back on this thread trying to remember the flags – Seraf Jun 27 '23 at 04:13