That’s probably the fault of the chosen filesystem and installation method, not the drives. See what I mentioned above:
That’s to be expected. ISO mode is the “unpack the ISO into a filesystem on the disk” mode. (Also note that “DD mode” and “FAT32 FS” are contradictory - you can either format a drive with a filesystem, or flash a file to the drive, but not both at the same time. Rufus’s UI is less than intuitive, so I’m guessing it probably doesn’t do a great job of telling you whether it’s formatting the drive or flashing it. I haven’t used it in a long time though.)
Be warned that this will basically overwrite the whole drive, which can shorten the drive’s lifespan. There are limited cases where it’s useful to do this, but it shouldn’t be done often.
On the wiki, the current tool recommended for flashing the Kicksecure ISO under Windows is balenaEtcher:
Which is somewhat unfortunate, as balenaEtcher has potentially serious privacy concerns:
But so far it’s the only ISO flasher for Windows that is both somewhat trustworthy (i.e. it’s not expected to be malware, except inasmuch as one considers telemetry malicious), and has a user interface that is easy to use correctly.
I’m aware of that, but I doubt it. Tails has quit using Etcher, since it was found to be surreptitiously sending data “home”. It’s on their site. I tried RosaWriter, but it didn’t work at all. I uploaded Rufus 4.7 to VirusTotal, and it came back totally clean: VirusTotal - File - 45777d818fc9ba187bcc7b930583764130ea71100fd9e3c66d4a7143bdbce4c5
Here is a thread talking about someone who wrapped Rufus in a malware, but the dev himself was reassuring that it wasn’t him, and the downloads from his site were clean: Is Rufus safe? (Again) : r/Windows11
I’m telling you my experience: with those settings, I burnt it reliably three times. In my previous testing with the dubious USB Flash drives, it usually did not fail to burn and run the ISO; but some times when I tried, I’m sure some of the probs. were that I was trying burning in the ISO and DD modes. I presume you might have tried it in the past; but are you sure it was with those settings? Maybe a problem was fixed since an earlier version.
I do consider telemetry extremely sus if it is not disclosed; as reportedly with Etcher. (If it is disclosed, and is excessive, it is also sus; not that I have specifics about Etcher.) I’m saying it worked, so long as I used DD mode and not NTFS; but not if I did. How many failures were due to using those problem options, or bad USB flash drives? I’m saying, I think I’ve figured it out. I do believe the “dd” command in a *nix or WSL *nix should work fine. I believe I successfully tried it, with the SeaGlass ones. My problem usually wasn’t producing USB flash drives with ISOs that booted and showed the menu fine; but getting them to install to another drive successfully.
It could be an SD specific thing, too. I haven’t tried it on USB flash drives; so maybe different Rufus settings might be needed, if it works at all. I’m inclined to take a break from more installing it for a while. At a minimum, it could be another avenue to explore. And yes, it would be seem to be working as intended. After working on it sporadically over a month, mostly to find out that the problem was lame media, I can actually get to use it now - Yay! I like where it’s coming from, from what I could tell by playing around with it a little - extreme privacy features available; but optional, if a more practical setup is needed. Based on a stable distro. Whole disk encryption. Installation ran smoothly, in a timely manner. No crazy errors booting up; just some status messages..
Other posts I cam across were talking about false positives from antivirus/malware software. it is noteworthy that a lot of perfectly good softs get flagged sometimes; yet VirusTotal does not have a single hit on ver. 4.7. That issue would evidently has been cleaned up; so that all those vendors of the scanners satisfied themselves that it was not malware. Then, there’s the above thread with a HUGE number of posts in support of its being clean: “Is rufus software safe? (Solved) - Page 1.” I have only been using it for a few months, but have no sign malware. The Tails guys do support the use of Rufus; but not Etcher. Sorry to be skipping the direct links for some of this. I’ve really been working on getting it to work, a lot recently. Thx for picking up my slack, Patrick.
If memory serves (and a lot of these two recent replies is from memory), the issue with Etcher is that it said it had no telemetry, or words to that effect, in their FAQs or some place similar, when it did.
That means things are probably working as intended.