Bootable USB failing at "Stage 1 of the boot process"

Help
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I’ve been trying to install NixOS using both the latest (as of June 29, 2025 ~21:00 GMT) ISOs but I’ve been running into “An error occurred at Stage 1” messages that are (essentially) verbatim to the screenshot on this discourse issue.

  • The USB was made using dd (sudo dd if=<path-to-iso> of=/dev/sd<X> bs=1M status=progress).
  • I tried three separate USB sticks on multiple (bare metal) machines; some of which I’ve already installed NixOS on
  • I tried both minimal and graphical ISOs with the same result.
  • The SHA256 sums are fine

I also tried looking for old ISOs here (as suggested by the NixOS download page), but finding the binaries is not clear to a plebe like myself. ChatGPT helped, kind of, by providing me with explicit links to some old ISOs it claims is from June 20, 2025—not the release I wanted—but those came with some distinct issues.

Any tips are highly appreciated!

2

Update: I was able to get a working bootable usb with gnome-disk-utility. I’m not sure why dd failed, but at least it did so consistently.