Rufus dd mode partitioning issues

I'm trying to use Rufus to create a bootable USB drive to install Manjaro. I set it to dd mode like Manjaro's site says to do, but Rufus seems to be partitioning my drive incorrectly. I've tried a 32GB flash drive and a 16GB flash drive, but in both cases Rufus created a 4MB FAT partition offset by 1999MB. Am I doing something wrong?

ImageWriter, the other program Manjaro recommends for making a bootable USB drive, does the same thing.

2 Answers

In this mode, Rufus does not actually partition your disk at all. It writes the image exactly as it comes, and the image brings its own partitions, the partition table, the bootloader, and everything.

So you see weird partitions because that's how this particular Manjaro image was built.

In general, the most likely reason for it looking weird is that Linux .iso images try to be compatible with several different boot methods: CD and HDD, BIOS and UEFI, etc. with the same files even belonging to multiple filesystems. (E.g. when a BIOS system reads it as a CD, it uses one set of files, and when an UEFI system reads it as a HDD/USB disk, it needs another.)

(Note that in this mode, Rufus' own "BIOS/UEFI" option does nothing, since it's again part of the image and not built by Rufus.)

So when you create your drive in DD image mode using Rufus (which is definitely recommended for all Linux drives created with Rufus, not just Manjaro), it has one of two modes: UEFI (non-CSM) or BIOS. This partition appears in UEFI mode Linux disks, which is recommended if you are running a UEFI machine (check your mobo manual for what firmware you have).

This partition that confuses you is the EFI System Partition (ESP). A short explanation of it is that it houses the bootloader(s) for your machine. It usually has a small folder called efi, which contains a few files suffixed with .efi and other small files. Don’t mess with it, as it is critical for your drive to function.

If you want to see the contents of the other files from Windows, you really can’t unless you go to Disk Management and assign drive letters to other partitions on the drive, which it probably won’t recognize anyway. You’d have to see them from a Linux machine or even from your flash drive after you booted from it. That’s really not recommended anyway: just leave the contents as is and boot from it, and it should work.