When trying to transfer an ISO to a USB stick, I find

    dd if=<file> of=<device> bs=4M; sync

as per Debian wiki [1] works for me with Debian isos and recently a CentOS live CD image when installing on another laptop. Oddly enough, USB sticks prepared using unetbootin fail with Debian ISOs (boots but continually complains about not being able to find CD-ROM) but also works with CentOS based ISOs.

[1] http://www.debian.org/CD/faq/#write-usb

Every single Debian USB image I've tried to flash with dd has failed in the last few years. I have to boot up a windows virtual machine and use LinuxLive USB Creator to create one.

It's odd as the RaspberryPi debian image works perfectly fine.

That's odd. It should be fine, but here are some things to check:

- Make sure that none of the filesystems on the USB stick are mounted before you begin. Otherwise, the filesystem drivers might corrupt something.

- Use a larger block size that's a power of 2 (e.g. bs=4096k). The default is 512 bytes, which is too small. This should just speed things up, but using writes that are smaller than the actual flash erase blocks can cause a lot of extra erases, and maybe your flash stick breaks when you do that.

- Run 'sync' after using dd, and wait for disk activity to finish. dd doesn't flush to disk by default.

- Don't use an amd64 image on a 32-bit machine. Don't use ia64 on a 64-bit PC.

- Try using synchronized I/O:

    sudo dd if=debian-7.2.0-i386-CD-1.iso of=/dev/sdx bs=4096k oflag=sync

Thanks, I'll come back and read this next time I do it. The first thing I checked was the bit length, though it could be the file system type or the synchronized io

Ubuntu's usb-creator-gtk works fine for me. I do agree it's disappointing you can't just dd it.

Strange.. I do it without problem at every install.

I'd love to see a cross browser app, one that worked on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux that just required to to drag and drop an image and write to USB.