I thought you wanted to copy it to physical hardware? What I did is I copied the img file to a thumb drive, then I had a second thumb drive where I had a live environment of a distribution. I booted my system from the second thumb drive so that I had a live environment, then it would looked Iike this as in disk setup:
- sda: main disk of my pc
- sdb: thumb drive where I booted from into the live environment
- sdc: thumb drive where I copied the img file to.
For you I would double check which is which from the live environment using:
lsblk
Then after you know which is which you can use
dd to copy over the thumb drive with the img file.
Finally I copied over what I had on the thumb drive to the main disk of my pc.
Code:
dd bs=4M if=/dev/sdc of=/dev/sda conv=fsync oflag=direct status=progress
So what I did was a bit different, so do at your own risk what I explain. I think it is probably smart to have your other thumb drive with the live environment to be actually the distribution you want to boot/install in case things go south, unless it's Arch or Gentoo and you are out at sea without a working/stable internet connection. That's all the advice I can give on that, hope that helps