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Tails no longer recommending balenaEtcher (tails.net)

submitted 3 days ago by xela@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

111 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I am shocked by this - the quote in below is very concerning:

"However, in 2024, the situation changed: balenaEtcher started sharing the file name of the image and the model of the USB stick with the Balena company and possibly with third parties."

Can't see myself using this software anymore...

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[–] harsh3466@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

I just tried this the other day and was unable to boot from the USB. Any chance you could shed some light on what I might have screwed up?

The command was:

dd if=fedora.iso of=/dev/sdc bs=4M status=progress

The USB stick was not mounted and the fedora image was verified. The command completed successfully but I couldn't boot from it. When I used fedora writer to burn the same image to the same USB stick it booted no problem.

Edit: spelling & capitalization

[–] Maiq@lemy.lol 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Did you make sure that the of is correct? lsblk to make sure.

If your sure it wrote to the right drive i would make sure that you have a good download. Did you run your checksums?

I think fedora works with secureboot but you might want to disable it just to see if that is the issue. I believe you can reenable it after install.

Make sure to go into the bios and boot from external drive/usb.

Out of 15 years of using dd i have never had a problem.

[–] harsh3466@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I did verify with lsblk, with a listing before and after plugging in the stick to be absolutely sure.

I also did verify the checksum of the ISO.

I'll double check SecureBoot, but as I mentioned, the same ISO written to the same stick with Fedora writer did boot in the same machine it wouldn't boot from with the dd version.

I know it's something I did or didn't do to make it work correctly, so this is not me trying to dunk on dd, just trying to understand what I did wrong.

[–] Maiq@lemy.lol 1 points 1 day ago

just trying to understand what I did wrong.

You might not have done anything wrong.

There is also the possibility of a bad USB drive or write memory failure. There is lots of things that could go wrong that's not your fault. Might try a different USB or a different USB port on your machine.

You might want to try zeroing out the USB, if=/dev/zero. Then you might need to make a new partition table. You can use something like gparted. Or https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-manipulate-partition-tables-with-fdisk-cfdisk-and-sfdisk-on-linux

You can try GPT or DOS. I dont think it matters.

Not sure if the ISO will have the partition table so you might want make the new partition table just to be sure the stick defiantly has one. If dd overwrites it from the iso no harm no foul.

Thats all the troubleshooting steps I can think of right now.