Arch Live USB Boot Error

[weary heart]

I am currently attempting to install Arch Linux on my computer. Expected behaviour would be for the install to complete successfully, instead I receive a multitude of errors which I do not know the cause of.

USB: 32 GB, Formatted to FAT32 by Rufus on Windows, GPT, DD image mode.

PC Specs: i9-13900k, 4070 TiS, 64 GB 6000 MHz RAM, > 1 TB free space, currently running Windows 11 Home

Specific path of action:
Torrented the Arch 2024 08 01 iso with QBittorrent on Win11, used portable Rufus binary to make a 32 GB Intenso USB into a live boot medium. Bad Sector scan indicated no damage to the USB. Restarted computer, opened UEFI, booted the stick. Expected behaviour up until :: running cleanup hook [udev], at which point in all but two cases a SQUASHFS error (see img 1 and 3) causes the device to lock up completely, not even emergency console.

On two occassions, the boot did pass this barrier and displayed a "Welcome to Arch message" before dumping a stack trace and going into panic again (see image 2 for reference.) As this happens almost instantly, I cannot ascertain what the error is because the kernel panic locks up the entire device.

[quasi bolt]

seems like fairly typical data corruption. There are 3 places this could be taking place.

1. the ISO you downloaded is corrupt and you flashed bad data to your usb drive

2. your drive is dead or dying and is corrupting the good data you wrote onto it

3. you have such extreme memory overclocking/timing issues that that memory is always getting corrupted when running xz. This is almost certainly not the case especially as you have a running windows drive.

[weary heart]

1 seems unlikely since the issue was also occuring on a Ubuntu attempted install.
for 2, it was before even selecting any partitions or anything so idk where it was writing to, but its possible i guess
for 3, memory is actually underclocked since 6400 MHz was not running stable and thats factory settings

[quasi bolt]

if you have 2 different OS ISOs giving this issue its definitely a dead drive

try a different usb stick if you have one?

[weary heart]

as mentioned in the original description, the xz error occured on multiple old and a freshly bought stick. thats kinda why im losing my mind

[quasi bolt]

what is happening here is that installers load the OS into ram using squashFS

[weary heart]

I was using rufus but that should be fine, no?

[quasi bolt]

that is not part of the original description

I might suggest trying installing ventoy on one of your known good sticks and booting from iso directly there

should remove any potential issues with rufus setup

https://ventoy.net/en/index.html