I’ve got bad news and good news. The new sd card reader did not help but the good news is I can now write images to a usb drive. I installed Ubuntu on an old drive but was having problems imaging a USB drive so decided to go old school and burn a DVD. But I couldn’t get the install to work so I moved the DVD to another SATA port. My motherboard has some SATA channels that interface to the CPU and some that go thru a separate controller and the DVD was on one of those. When I moved the DVD to the direct interface I was able to install Ubuntu. I then tried Etcher from Ubuntu and it worked. When I went back to Win, Etcher also worked. Don’t ask me why but the DVD seemed to be causing the problems, maybe messing with the interrupts? To be complete I would put the DVD back on the other interface to see if the problem reappears but I’m tired of fighting it for now and the MB SATA connectors are hard to access. If I try I’ll let you know the results if you’re curious.