dd and 'Safely Remove Hardware'

I spent several hours of the night, early morning and morning trying to write bootable USBs using the dd+iso method. None of them would boot, and all of them showed as 'unpartitioned' to TRK and as having 1 partition to diskpart.

Finally tried not tidily clicking 'Safely remove hardware' before taking the freshly-written USB out of the PC. And it worked fine!

Possibly 'Safely remove hardware' does something to the drive that isn't necessary with a directly-written drive, and indeed that corrupts it.

Btw, I'm glad so many people are finding my original 'dd' post, it's the most popular thing I've ever written on the net by an order of magnitude, so I hope it's helpful.