i still had issues using 150MB electron based bloated and heavy software instead of rufus, not that it worked for me anyway
this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2025
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Privacy
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Thats a shame, it was one of the few disk imagers that "just worked"
Unrelated to balenaEtcher but I haven't been able to flash ISO files from Windows 11, either by using Rufus, Etcher, Fedora Media Writer, or even the WSL. I need to borrow a computer running a FLOSS operating system or to install OpenBSD first, and then from OpenBSD to download and burn an ISO file.
Just use dd. It's not that hard. You pass it 2 arguments: if= the file you want to flash, and of= the destination. If you're feeling fancy, pass in some status=progress. And don't forget to prepend it with sudo. That's it.
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
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.
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.
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.
Friendship ended with Balena
Now Rufus is my new best friend
Not using Ventoy in 2025?
I guess I could install Ventoy on the raspberry Pi's SD card, but I prefer it to be bare, since the idea is to keep it simple.
Ventoy uses several blobs without any instructions of compiling them yourself?
Is no one aware of Fedora Media Writer? It's FOSS and the most trustworthy ISO burning software in existence. It's only issue is that its named as if it is written only for producing Fedora bootable media. It works for everything.
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Why use a fancy GUI tool when good old dd does the trick
for Windows
cp command works well too
♬ Hello dd my old friend
I’ve come sudo with you again ♬
Hello cat or cp or pv... Or anything else that works with files
Huh this is news to me. Wonder why dd has been the defacto standard in guides everywhere for the past 15-20+ years
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dd
Never understood why you would use anything else. It's in coreutils!!!
Because GNU dd-rescue exists
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If you need a FOSS, cross platform GUI for bootable USB sticks, Raspberry Pi Imager is a really good solution.
It is mainly used to flash SD cards for RPIs, but also you can burn any ISO on any support with it.
I used to use the fedora media writer but the RPi imager software is so easy I switched
Ventoy is life!
did they ever clear up that random unexplained binaries issue?
From what I could gather, they're taken from Fedora and OpenSUSE. They're signed blobs for secure boot support.
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Linux mint factory USB creator just right click and make bootable.
That's interesting, apparently it was mentioned on github but nothing seems to have changed in the end
https://github.com/balena-io/etcher/issues/3784
Haven't used that software in a long time but maybe there's an opt-out somewhere during runtime? Although I don't see why a user needs to be required to opt out of nonsense like this when just writing firmware to a USB disk.
Only ever touched balenaEtcher when some project or distro recommended it. Overall prefer Rufus for this sort of thing when working on Windows.
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Honestly, if you're using Windows, then you most likely already sent any and all of your secrets to Microsoft anyway. Including that you installed Tails.
i still don't understand why anyone would use etcher. it's an electron wrapper over dd. it's 80MB where rufus is 1.5. when it appeared there were already other programs that did its job better.
I like clicking buttons that have a text on them saying what they do instead of trying to memorize a gajillion terminal commands and flags where I have to enter more commands and flags to see what they do.
plus it's some some sanity checks like not showing you your system drives. Or warning you when the drive you are about to nuke is suspiciously large and maybe not the usb drive you actually want to use.
This is basically the main feature. Stopping you from fatfingering the wrong drive
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I tried belenaEtcher once on my Mac... And it seemed to me more like a spyware than an actual software, I was a bit confused and never used it again.
Generally Ventoy is better than both. Choose a dedicated flash storage, flash Ventoy to it, then click and drag as many ISO's as can fit on your drive and you can boot from any one of them at any time.
Much better than Etcher or Rufus, IMO.
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Yet another reason for people to run a default prompt (deny until prompt answer) firewall.
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