I recently was trying to flash from an IMG file with dd, and it took a lot shorter than normal, and when I checked the drive, it had names like
\u2584\u00bc\u2591+\u03c6\u256bv\u2559.|
I don't know if I'm being stupid, or if it's a drive error. This is the code I used:
sudo dd if=~/Downloads/tails-amd64-4.20.img of=/dev/sdd1 bs=1M