So..I used GhostBSD in the past, and liked it, but I have to get rid of my towers, so I have procured a Latitude. I downloaded Ghost24, and Properties shows it to be a 2.7 GB iso file. I'm running Ubuntu Studio on my one remaining desktop, and I used Gparted to create a new ms-dos partition table and a single bootable FAT32 partition of 7.45GB. I tested it by copying a text file to it in my file manager, and that worked fine. Next, I delete the text file and try to dd the iso file to the USB drive, and I get:

myusername@StudioMonkey:~$ sudo dd if=/home/myusername/ISOs/GhostBSD-24.01.1.iso of=/dev/sdh bs=3M
[sudo] password for myusername:
857+1 records in
857+1 records out
2698809344 bytes (2.7 GB, 2.5 GiB) copied, 0.734014 s, 3.7 GB/s

But the file manager shows no files now exist on sdh; it's an empty partition. What am I doing wrong? Do I need a file system other than FAT32, or ?? Any suggestions are welcome, and thanks in advance.

Have you tried booting it?

Is zfs, and may now show files

You need to install the ISO image to the USB thumb drive, then change your firmware/BIOS setting to boot the USB thumb drive device.

When booting from the USB thumb drive, it will start GhostBSD. Once you get to the GhostBSD X window display, you should see a GhostBSD install icon. Select to install and the installation process will begin.

chadbsd: Thanks, but I have some years of experience creating USB iso files and installing from them, including for Ghost.

RodMyers: what concerns me is not just that my file manager doesn't show any files; it's that the terminal shows a transfer of 2.7 GB in 734 milliseconds. That's not physically possible with a USB 2 drive. It just looks to me as though dd didn't dd. I've used Balena Etcher a lot, but questioned in my mind whether that software would handle UFS2 or ZFS. Or does the choice of file system on the USB even matter for an iso file, other than capacity?

Weird. Linux does not see anything on the USB drive, but it does boot to a certain point. I now have another install problem, but I'll post that separately.
Thanks for your help!