Making a bootable flash drive with the balena Etcher 1.5

botond published 2019/12/20, p - 14:50 time

Content

 

Introductory

Balena Etcher is an open source, free program that allows you to conveniently create bootable flash drives for computers and bootable SD cards for Raspberries, for example. We’ve talked about how to make a bootable flash drive before On Windows with a Rufus program, Respectively On Debian with UNetbootin, in this tutorial we try the balena Etcher, which offers the ability to create bootable drives on both platforms.

 

 

Usage on Debian / Ubuntu systems

Most Linux distributions are supported, of which we now deal with Debian and Ubuntu.

Installation

Using the Etcher luggage

 

We install balena Etcher from its own repository, which we need to add to our own APT to our package manager's source list.

To do this, execute the following command:

echo "deb https://deb.etcher.io stable etcher" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/balena-etcher.list

Install the director package that will be needed to handle OpenPGP keys (it may already be up on some systems by default, but I had to install Debian 9 on Stretch):

apt-get -y install dirmngr

Then add the GPG key to the trusted key store:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 379CE192D401AB61

If a successful key is added, this output receives:

Executing: /tmp/apt-key-gpghome.WsEHDVsiFb/gpg.1.sh --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 379CE192D401AB61
gpg: key 379CE192D401AB61: public key "Bintray (by JFrog) <bintray@bintray.com>" imported
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg:               imported: 1

Finally, upgrade your luggage and install balena Etcher:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install balena-etcher-electron

I have now installed 229 MB of software and have installed it under the "Accessories" menu on my LXDE desktop.

A from the trunk downloaded version 1.5.51, but a Change Logbased on them, there are even newer versions that can be accessed in the form of source code. Compiling a newer version from source will not receive updates, while the in-store version will be slightly older, but will be constantly updated with other packages on our system.

Download executable startup file

If you do not want to add the luggage, or if there is a problem with it, we will download the launcher of the latest version of the program directly. To do this, go to the program download page:

https://www.balena.io/etcher/

From here, download the appropriate startup file for your distribution and simply run it.

Use

When you start the program, the Home screen receives a 3-step display:

balena Etcher 1.5 - Step 1: Select an image file

Here, select our installer ISO file you want to write to the flash drive. Here for the sake of simplicity, I am setting up Debian 10.1 netinstall ISO for trial. This is a small file, it will be written down quickly.

Then insert a flash drive that you want to write ISO to, or it could be an SD card in a card reader:

balena Etcher 1.5 - Step 2: Select a Pendrive

The flash drive of my choice had a GParted Live system on it, so now I'm going to overwrite this with the Debian 10.1 Netinstall ISO mentioned above.

Attention!
The entire contents of the inserted flash drive or SD card will be lost! So if you have important data on your device, make sure to save it first!

So if we have our target device, then we can go to Flash! sphere. You will then be prompted for the root password, which will be entered after typing:

balena Etcher 1.5 - Step 3: Flash Flash

It took about half a minute and the boot flash drive was ready and mounted, so it can be removed from the machine.

balena Etcher 1.5 - Successful operation

I also tested it on my old laptop, which still has BIOS, and the installer starts up nicely on the flash drive.

 

 

Use on Windows systems

Balena Etcher is available from Windows 7. In this section, I will show you how to use it on a Windows 7 machine.

Installation

The installation of the program is quite simple, we run it quickly.

First, go to balena Etcher's website and download the appropriate installation package for your Windows system:

balena Etcher 1.5 - Download for Windows

Then start it administrator the downloaded 136 MB installation package. Then a License Terms window appears:

balena Etcher 1.5 - Windows Installation - License Terms

We accept this and the program is already installed:

balena Etcher 1.5 - Windows installation

This is where the progress bar goes, and then the program starts.

Use

On Windows, we are greeted by the same window as step 3:

balena Etcher Windows - Select image file

Here I am going to rewrite my previous GParted Live ISO file, so I choose this one.

In the next step, we will also select the flash drive here:

balena Etcher Windows - Select Pendrive

And flash can go.

balena Etcher Windows Flash

Here, too, you can quickly write down an ISO file of approximately the same size, and then notify you of a successful operation:

balena Etcher Windows - Successful operation

 

 

Conclusion

So that would be the balena Etcher program to create the boot pen on Linux and Windows. The program is easy to install and the boot pen itself is very convenient, I can recommend it to anyone!