It was only 2010 that all Arch ISOs gained this feature (where you could write it directly to a USB drive) - from 2008 to 2010 they had special USB images.įurther, if you dd a drive directly, that drive is effectively read-only until you format it or use the remaining space somehow. This was not true about three or four years ago, when I looked at Arch.
You should be able to create a bootable USB using most (reasonably popular) distros' installation ISOs at present. You can think of it as doing equivalent of Arch Linux's or Gentoo's manual methods. It is not a GUI for dd (there are GUIs for dd, but SDC is not one of those). (Add an extra casper 1 file for persistence, if selected.
If you run Startup Disk Creator (SDC), you'll notice that it does three (four) things:
