That sounds like the drives you’re using are so slow that the default timeout value isn’t long enough; I’ve seen these errors when installing to some USB 3 TeamGroup drives in the past. Many USB flash drives have decent read speed but horrible write speed, even USB 3 drives.
The good solution would be to use faster drives, but if you need to use the drives you have, you can lengthen the timeout:
- Boot the live ISO, and select
LIVE Mode | SYSMAINT Session | system maintenance, install. - Click
Open Terminal. - Run
sudo nano /usr/lib/calamares/modules/bootloader-config/module.desc. - Adjust the
timeout: 600line to something longer, liketimeout: 5000. - Save with Ctrl+S, exit with Ctrl+X.
- Close the terminal window.
- Click
Install System. - Install like normal.
Because USB installations like you’re doing are explicitly supported, and USB drives are so frequently slow, we should probably lengthen some of these timeouts.
This sounds like Rufus is buggy to me. That message is most likely from GRUB. Etcher exists and probably would work better, but I didn’t mention it since like you mentioned, it does phone home. I don’t know of any other good ISO burning tools for Windows unfortunately. Thankfully, it looks like dd in Linux is doing the trick, so hopefully you won’t need to use Windows for this sort of thing 