Tails no longer recommending balenaEtcher
-
The article was about Windows. And, no, I'm not on Windows. i use GrapheneOS on my phone and triple-boot Arch/Debian/Fedora on my laptop. I'm just making the point that the article was about Windows so replying with UNIX commands doesn't really make sense.
-
I used it less than a week ago for a Mint install, worked fine.
-
Because of the risk of accidentally wiping the main drive if you're just copy pasting stuff
-
Ventoy uses several blobs without any instructions of compiling them yourself?
-
Just use
dd
. It's not that hard. You pass it 2 arguments:if=
the file you want to flash, andof=
the destination. If you're feeling fancy, pass in somestatus=progress
. And don't forget to prepend it withsudo
. That's it. -
If you actually read the post, you would have known, it's fine, but there are some privacy concerns with it:
“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.”
-
If you actually read the post, you would have known, it does work, but there are some privacy concerns with it:
“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.”
-
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 notounted 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.
-
Dang, nice! I've been using dd for nearly 30 years and have never seen that. I actually used to used dcfldd because it had better progress reporting than dd (and supported repeated patterns for input). Thanks for sharing!
-
Wow, I was not aware of that. I really liked balena. Thankfully, I haven't been using it since installing Mint.
-
I seriously DGAF who knows which Mint edition I installed or the brand of flash drive I used.
-
This sounded like a techy Ron Swanson.
-
Don't use Fedora myself, but it may not be a hybrid ISO that becomes bootable when written... so I looked and you are missing a flag
dd if=/path/to/image.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=8M status=progress oflag=direct
From https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/creating-and-using-a-live-installation-image/
-
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. -
Ah! Thank you! I knew it was something I screwed up!
-
You didn't screw up, you beautifully proved why the CLI is never a simple solution.
-
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-linuxYou 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.
-
Here's a wildcard people might not know about: Raspberry Pi Imager
I use it because it's faster than Etcher and it also has a bunch of quick links to download popular images (mainly for RPI and other arm-based SBCs) in one click which is handy if you use those regularly.
-
Are the scissors broken in your house, son?
At least one person got the reference!