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Comment by Isthatablackgsd | Hacker News Reader

Did anyone have a good experience with Balena Etcher? I don’t have a good runs with it, the boot process always failed to detect the files in the USB drive that was formatted by Etcher. BIOS couldn’t detect the partition or anything in that USB. I tried with various Linux distro and Windows ISOs, it just failed to load or not detectable in the booting. Even it couldn’t load a simple Gparted partition.

The only one I found consistent working is Rufus, it always works for me. Gparted, Linux Mint, Ubuntu, various distro and it works great with Windows ISO (even there is a Windows Media Creator). Rufus is only one so far in my experience that handles everything perfectly. Rufus is basically VLC of USB bootable utility, whereas Balena Etcher is Windows Media Player without all of the codecs (the original window version, not the MPC-HC/BE).

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I've had a bad experience!

After writing a usb boot disk, it automatically switched to my external drive media instead of selecting nothing at all. I had to do another and after plugging the same drive back in, I wrote to the external drive media instead. I lost several personal things that day and paid for some recovery software.

The safe thing to do here was to not to automatically select some high-volume media.

I haven't used Balena etcher in forever, but back when it came out it was a godsend. This was also during a time when I already had enough skills with the command line that writing images to drives on either Linux or Windows should have been easy. But I always ran into roadblocks. When I discovered Balena, everything just worked.

I hope it didn't devolve into something that doesn't just work.

Yes, I've used Balena Etcher dozens of times from my Windows machine and I've never had a problem with it. Windows and Linux ISOs work just fine.

Same here - I have had issues with the other mentioned softwares but rarely with etcher. (I have had cards be seemingly broken and fail to image - I don’t think etcher was to blame. )

Seems to be hardware- and OS-dependent. Eons ago, don't know the version anymore I used it under Linux out of curiosity I guess, and because some project nagged about using it for verification of written images, or else.

Anyways, that thing always complained about a bad checksum at the end, no matter which media, system, port, writer I used.

And I always thought: Oh, really? And booted the failed checksum images flawlessly. To me this thing seemed like a stupid prank, adding no value over any other method. Even less so, considering the Electron crap.

Btw. the writing checksummed perfectly fine with dd on all the media, hardware, system and ports I used.

And don't bug me with did you file a bug?

Why? They can bug off for all I care :)

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