Tails - Replacing balenaEtcher with Rufus as installer for Windows
tails.net

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…

    • admin@sh.itjust.works
      1·
      1 day ago

      I only tried to use it once, and same. 150MB of a Web app to copy an ISO? I think I was using a Macbook to flash it and decided to use ventoy instead, with my PC.

  • Océane@jlai.luFrançais
    3·
    1 day ago

    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.

  • Andromxda 🇺🇦🇵🇸🇹🇼@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    123·
    2 days ago

    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.

    • harsh3466@lemmy.ml
      8·
      2 days ago

      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·
        2 days ago

        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·
          2 days ago

          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·
            2 days 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.

  • PullPantsUnsworn@lemmy.mlEnglish
    26·
    2 days ago

    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.

  • xttweaponttx@sh.itjust.works
    11·
    1 day ago

    Balenaetcher has, for me at least, failed to write to USBs for the last 3 years or so that I’ve tried to use it - meanwhile random iso writers from flatpak have been more reliable for me. Very obnoxious that so many iso related sites recommend it. Rufus kicks tons of ass, if for whatever reason you’re still on windows.

    Also on most distros I’ve tried, the disk utility has some sort of right click or context menu that gets you a ‘restore disk image’ button that works great as well.

    Edit= I used Popsicle USB writer from flatpak on steam deck with no issue today! Made by system76 (makers of popOS) and found on flatpak. It is absolutely no frills, but works well enough to write an SD card image for a raspberry pi! 🙂

    • Tja@programming.dev
      67·
      2 days ago

      Flatpack? You are using Linux and you need “iso writers”? Is your dd broken, son?

      • xttweaponttx@sh.itjust.works
        3·
        1 day ago

        😂 I also read this as Ron’s voice!

        Nah as much as i love doing stuff via terminal, I am extra paranoid specifically about writing to the wrong device and losing data; I prefer as many confirmations as possible that I’m writing to the correct drive, and graphical installers tend to give me just a few more reassurances. A few examples would be stuff like

        • a graphical representation of partitions (the general layout of a drive tends to offer an easy ‘fingerprint’ in my mind; like the pattern of partitions help me confirm I’m looking at, say, a Debian install USB compared to a single-partition general purpose storage disk)
        • icons for different types of devices, like an SD card, USB, or hard disk icon
        • confirmation dialogues summarizing what device is targeted, and what all will be performed

        I’m also the kind of person who stares at a written email worrying about every last nuance of my phrasing, so 🤷‍♂️😂 definitely a me problem, I think!

    • Preflight_Tomato@lemm.ee
      1·
      1 day ago

      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.

    • utubas@lemm.ee
      4·
      2 days ago

      Ventoy uses several blobs without any instructions of compiling them yourself?

        • madame_gaymes@programming.devEnglish
          2·
          2 days ago

          I know, but just because someone doesn’t understand something or ignores it doesn’t mean it isn’t the best/simplest choice for 90% of cases.

      • dev_null@lemmy.ml
        22·
        2 days ago

        It’s faster to drag and drop a downloaded ISO and choose the target from a dropdown, than do it on a command line. And get a progress bar. As much as command line is usually faster, it isn’t in this case.

        Yes you can also get a progress bar on the command line but it’s more typing again, and realistically you need to look the option up every time if you use dd once every 3 months.

        • madame_gaymes@programming.devEnglish
          4·
          2 days ago

          Lmao. Uses a computer, typing is too much. It took more typing to write your comment than to craft a tab-completed dd command, even if you had to call the help menu to refresh your available options, jus’ sayin’

          I get it though, the general public are scared of the big bad 'puter magic and need GUIs.

            • madame_gaymes@programming.devEnglish
              2·
              2 days ago

              Shhh, that’s too advanced. Besides, CLI is outdated and slower than GUIs, this is just insane behavior /s

              I honestly didn’t even need to specify tab-completed. It’s still less typing than their comment unless your paths are miles long.

          • dev_null@lemmy.ml
            11·
            2 days ago

            Let me try: Lmao. Uses a computer, still does stuff the slower way because learning new things is too difficult.

            To be serious, I am looking for the best solutions for my use cases, not adequate ones. Yes dd works perfectly fine and as you noted doesn’t take long to use anyway. But just because it’s fine doesn’t mean other approaches aren’t better.

            A GUI tool can offer or take a list of download URLs for common distros so downloading isn’t a separate step, it can check if the target device is a flash drive and not a hard drive by mistake, it can automatically choose the optimal block size for the device, it can verify the process by reading it back from the device, can show you the current filesystem, label, and usage of the target device to confirm, it can handle flashing to multiple devices at the same time with separate and total progress bars.

            If I wanted to do all that on the command line it’d be quite a lot of commands or a sizeable script to write. Or I can use a simple dd command and lose out on all of the above. Either way it’s a worse option. I will only use dd when a GUI tool isn’t installed, or when I’m on a system without a DE.

            • madame_gaymes@programming.devEnglish
              1·
              2 days ago

              We will have to agree to disagree.

              At least you came back with reasons beyond “I don’t like typing.”

              ETA: > learning new things is too difficult.

              I could use this argument for folks that don’t want to learn CLI as well, doesn’t really track in either direction.

    • Firnin@feddit.org
      7·
      2 days ago

      It is indeed the best way, but somehow I am still anxious using this command, even after flashing countless USB drives 😅

      • memphis@sopuli.xyz
        3·
        2 days ago

        I’ve made it a habit to type out the command without sudo at first, then when it yells at me about permissions I am reminded to go back and double-check.

  • pH3ra@lemmy.ml
    36·
    3 days ago

    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.

    • phar@lemmy.ml
      5·
      2 days ago

      I used to use the fedora media writer but the RPi imager software is so easy I switched

  • Brickfrog@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    45·
    3 days ago

    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.

    • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      7·
      3 days ago

      I’ve used Sardu on Windows for making multi-iso bootable USB sticks a long time ago in the past, but I’d admittedly never looked at their ToS or Privacy Policy. My use case was slapping some live boot antivirus scanners, data recovery tools, and one or two lightweight liveboot-Linux ISOs on one USB as a portable toolkit.

      When I’m making anything else from Windows, I’ve always stuck with Rufus. Had never heard of BalenaEtcher before now.

      • Cataphract@lemmy.ml
        5·
        3 days ago

        I"m horrible with names of programs and mess with a lot of junk comps switching out OS’s and just tinkering around so I’m always using crazy utility programs. BalenaEtcher is used in a lot of tutorials or guides for installations, I think recently both Elementary OS and even Ubuntu had instructions pointing towards BalenaEtcher.

        I never thought it was a great program, it was finicky to use and errors out quickly multiple times. Looking back I saw the signs, weird new program being promoted above other “well established” burn programs, ads, and now scrolling down their webpage it’s just a bunch of promotional subscription bullshit. I think I just threw up in my mouth a little bit looking at the “balenacloud” and “balenasense”, like if they’re collecting your data through etcher then all of that shit is probably compromised. Another fucking google wannabe corp.