How to create a Manjaro Linux live USB through the CLI

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You can check the latest updated version of this article at lobotuerto's notes - How to create a Manjaro Linux live USB through the CLI.

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Download the Manjaro i3 community edition

Talking about Manjaro I prefer the i3 community edition.

Be sure to have an .iso file ready, or download the latest image from here.

Verify with SHA1 or SHA256

After you download the .iso file, you can also download the .sha1 or .sha256 files.

To verify the ISO against them, you can do this:

sha1sum -c manjaro-i3-17.1.12-stable-x86_64.iso.sha1
sha256sum -c manjaro-i3-17.1.12-stable-x86_64.iso.sha256

If everything is allright, you’ll see: manjaro-i3-17.1.12-stable-x86_64.iso: OKfor both of them.

Find the right letter for your device

Insert the stick into a port and get a list of connected devices with this:

sudo fdisk -l

Identify the letter for your drive on the output, in my case the drive I’m looking for is this one:

Disk /dev/sdc: 14.3 GiB, 15376318464 bytes, 30031872 sectors

I can tell because it’s —supposedly— a 16GB device, look at the 14.3 GiB size reported above.

In this example, the letter for the drive is the c from sdc. It could have been b, d or something else. Just make sure that it is indeed the drive you want to trash.

You won’t be able to recover anything from it once it’s been zeroed.

Zero the bits out of the USB drive

Next, let’s zero the drive out, this serves as a security measure and also it allows you to tell ifthe drive is still functioning well —if the drive is dying, the process will take an unusually long time, or it’ll get stuck before reaching the end, that’s a sign that you need to get a new USB.

Ok, let’s write zeros all over the USB drive with:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc bs=4M status=progress conv=fdatasync

NOTE: Remember that the command above is considering that the USB is located at: /dev/sdc.

Make sure you have the right path for yours!

That command will report progress back to you.

Copy the ISO image to the USB drive

When finished, go to the directory where you downloaded the .iso file and deploy it to the USB drive like this:

sudo dd if=manjaro-i3-17.1.12-stable-x86_64.iso of=/dev/sdc bs=4M \
status=progress conv=fdatasync

That’s it, now you should have a bootable USB with Manjaro Linux in it!