Did you wait a bit after dd finished? dd finishing does not mean that the data had completed being physically copied over. You can use the fsync or fdatasync etc. flags to make sure dd only “finishes” when the data was completely physically copied over.
I agree, but I also note that I have discovered that the sync is always required when dd’ing a USB stick on Fedora Linux, but on my Arch Linux system, dd does not return control to the CLI until writing has completed and synced. I wonder why dd acts differently on two distros?
Hrm, not a clue I’m afraid. Perhaps one can configure this while building coreutils, and the builds for Fedora and arch are different? (Could be a number of other things too though).
Yes, as noted above, unless you use the fsync etc. options, it is not reporting the progress of the physical write on to the USB stick. Fedora Media Writer perhaps reports progress of the physical write but we’ll have to check its sources to confirm.
So, either you use the additional flags, or just wait for the stick lights to stop showing progress. I suspect if you try to unmount it, you will get a warning that it is still being written to.