5 ms·

USBImager – A minimal GUI app that can write disk images to USB drives

57 points by jakobdabo 6y ago

mikece 6y ago
balenaEtcher has spyware? The size versus Etcher -- 256 kb to 210 MB -- makes this worth checking out!
- mig39 6y ago
  balenaEtcher has advertising for sure. Not sure about spyware.
  - mbroncano 6y ago
    It’s debatable whether there’s an actual difference nowadays.
    - colejohnson66 6y ago
      I can’t really see it as spyware if it’s your own product, though.
rvz 6y ago
YES. This is the replacement open-source GUI USB imager app I have been waiting for. > 500KB vs 210 MB Essentially this is a 99.99999% reduction of disk space and run-time usage with the same functionality which really puts its electron garbage counterpart to infinite shame. There is no contest here. Feel the satisfying moment of removing this 'balenaEtcher' bloatware and replace it with a true, efficient and magnificent cross-platform native alternative app.
- CyberDildonics 6y ago
  I can't agree more. Using electron to make a simple program into a 200MB behemoth just so you can draw a window and some text with javascript is a slap in the face to your users. The binary size on windows is actually only 268KB
- fizzled 6y ago
  What, do you have a 30MB drive or something? Did you ban all applications over 1MB?
- mixmastamyk 6y ago
  Balena means whale, btw. Not sure why one would choose it, when there are so many options.
  - CyberDildonics 6y ago
    I think it is recommended on a lot of websites for making raspian images.
- snypher 6y ago
  >balenaEtcher It was bigger than the .img I wanted to write, and that was a whole distro!
peter_d_sherman 6y ago
It would be an interesting test to test all USB imagers alongside one another, and then use a different USB imager than the one used to write the USB stick, to verify it. Or, use every USB imager other than the one used as the writer -- to perform multiple verifications... Perhaps one would find interesting discrepancies in some, but probably not all, USB imaging softwares -- that way... Anyway, this one seems to deserve some points for being quite close to as simple as possible, with as minimum dependencies as possible...
- fuzzfactor 6y ago
  This does seem like excellent work. Maybe Etcher accomplishes some of this too. Seems to me the imaging is more perfect than the subsequent hardware interaction. Different USB drives and controllers can have greatly dissimilar working geometries as they carry partitions & filesystems, so the hardware is not really interchangeable enough to begin with for direct imaging to be a very reliable means of getting a different partition and/or filesystem onto a flash drive for instance. The working layout may or may not be based on the _native_ detected geometry of the device. And mainboards can have their preferences as to which geometries they prefer and when. This can make data appear to disappear depending on where you plug in the USB drive, and more commonly cause difficulty booting. The IMG file of a floppy disk is standard but the blank disk always needed complete perfect sectors to write the IMG to, afterward their FAT12 filesystem was universally accessible and bootable just like it had actually been formatted indivdually by standard MSDOS. It was just a clone. The ISO of a CDROM is standardized too. USB drive behavior is not very standard, so an IMG or DD type file captured from a particular device can not be expected to perform indentically unless it is restored in an identical way to the original device or an equivalent device which has no show-stopping dissimilarity. Since the beginning until just recently USB flash drives were sold pre-formatted with FAT32. Now they are just getting too big for FAT32, so over 32GB has NTFS. Now not always will most of the drives in the world have been originally formatted with very Microsoft-compatible procedures. At least one major supplier has a fundamental formatting error propagated for years. Different mainboards will tolerate this to different degrees. Depending on what you start with the image you capture might not be the best to rely on. Defragmentation can also be an issue to work around. A Live Linux distribution intended for direct _burning_ to flash drives is not a good distribution method compared to burning the ISO to disk. Rufus is good because it takes a bootable ISO and writes it in a file-based way onto just about any USB device, and various USB drives end up more bootable than you can get from perfectly copying a prepared master image bitwise.
brian_herman 6y ago
i wonder how this compares to rufus?
- watersb 6y ago
  Rufus is great, but Windows only.
  - brian_herman 6y ago
    yeah maybe i should give this a try then
keaneu 6y ago
It just says "USB image writer has stopped working" when trying to create a backup image file from device (on Win10 Pro here).
mumblerino 6y ago
Side note: macOS ships with Disk Utility, which as far as I know can do exactly this, relatively easily, so I don’t think you need 3rd-party software.
- reportgunner 6y ago
  Same with linux and dd
- shock 6y ago
  GNOME Disks can also write an image to a disk.
SyneRyder 6y ago
Suggestion for the developer if they see this - please add a PayPal or other donation option in addition to BTC. Just a bit too much friction on BTC for normals/muggles like me, but if there was a PayPal link you might have had money in your account by now. I want to support this just because of what it represents - native app development, small executables, tools that are optimized. None of this bloated Electron junk. I bet they could even put some Etcher like graphics / PNGs into this interface and it would still be 100x smaller than Etcher. I wonder if it would be possible to port this natively to Haiku too?
pjmlp 6y ago
Kids this is how one does cross platform properly since the early days of computing, without Electron fat.
tinus_hn 6y ago
Does this produce bootable drives? Thought you needed al kinds of custom stuff for that.
lomkju 6y ago
dd is just 79K As simple as sudo dd if=name-of-iso.iso of=/dev/sdb status="progress" https://medium.com/@tbeach/use-unix-dd-command-to-os-bootable-on-usb-drive-6671945d95a6 https://medium.com/@tbeach/use-unix-dd-command-to-os-bootabl... You're Welcome.
- pantalaimon 6y ago
  Actually you can just use cp cp name-of-iso.iso /dev/sdb
  - charlesdaniels 6y ago
    If you care about showing the progress pv < input.iso > /dev/sdX Is a more portable way to do that, as "status=progress" is a GNU modification to dd, as I recall. Of course the most portable is to use one of the POSIX mainstays like cat or cp.
  - ed25519FUUU 6y ago
    cat foo.iso > /dev/sdb
mehrdadn 6y ago
Related projects I know of (might be useful if someone can point out salient differences): - Rufus: https://rufus.ie/ https://rufus.ie/ - UNetbootin: https://unetbootin.github.io/ https://unetbootin.github.io/ - Win32 Disk Imager: https://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/
- noxer 6y ago
  - YUMI https://www.pendrivelinux.com/yumi-multiboot-usb-creator/ https://www.pendrivelinux.com/yumi-multiboot-usb-creator/ - Ventoy https://www.ventoy.net https://www.ventoy.net usbimager_1.0.4-i686-win-gdi crashes without error and leaves a USB corrupt (works fine again after a format)
- joezydeco 6y ago
  Win32DiskImager has been my go-to writer (for Windows hosts) for a decade now. 44MB and does the job exactly the way I want.

57 points by jakobdabo 6y ago

mikece 6y ago

balenaEtcher has spyware? The size versus Etcher -- 256 kb to 210 MB -- makes this worth checking out!

mig39 6y ago
balenaEtcher has advertising for sure. Not sure about spyware.
- mbroncano 6y ago
  It’s debatable whether there’s an actual difference nowadays.
  - colejohnson66 6y ago
    I can’t really see it as spyware if it’s your own product, though.

rvz 6y ago

YES. This is the replacement open-source GUI USB imager app I have been waiting for. > 500KB vs 210 MB Essentially this is a 99.99999% reduction of disk space and run-time usage with the same functionality which really puts its electron garbage counterpart to infinite shame. There is no contest here. Feel the satisfying moment of removing this 'balenaEtcher' bloatware and replace it with a true, efficient and magnificent cross-platform native alternative app.

CyberDildonics 6y ago
I can't agree more. Using electron to make a simple program into a 200MB behemoth just so you can draw a window and some text with javascript is a slap in the face to your users. The binary size on windows is actually only 268KB
fizzled 6y ago
What, do you have a 30MB drive or something? Did you ban all applications over 1MB?
mixmastamyk 6y ago
Balena means whale, btw. Not sure why one would choose it, when there are so many options.
- CyberDildonics 6y ago
  I think it is recommended on a lot of websites for making raspian images.
snypher 6y ago
>balenaEtcher It was bigger than the .img I wanted to write, and that was a whole distro!

peter_d_sherman 6y ago

It would be an interesting test to test all USB imagers alongside one another, and then use a different USB imager than the one used to write the USB stick, to verify it. Or, use every USB imager other than the one used as the writer -- to perform multiple verifications... Perhaps one would find interesting discrepancies in some, but probably not all, USB imaging softwares -- that way... Anyway, this one seems to deserve some points for being quite close to as simple as possible, with as minimum dependencies as possible...

fuzzfactor 6y ago
This does seem like excellent work. Maybe Etcher accomplishes some of this too. Seems to me the imaging is more perfect than the subsequent hardware interaction. Different USB drives and controllers can have greatly dissimilar working geometries as they carry partitions & filesystems, so the hardware is not really interchangeable enough to begin with for direct imaging to be a very reliable means of getting a different partition and/or filesystem onto a flash drive for instance. The working layout may or may not be based on the _native_ detected geometry of the device. And mainboards can have their preferences as to which geometries they prefer and when. This can make data appear to disappear depending on where you plug in the USB drive, and more commonly cause difficulty booting. The IMG file of a floppy disk is standard but the blank disk always needed complete perfect sectors to write the IMG to, afterward their FAT12 filesystem was universally accessible and bootable just like it had actually been formatted indivdually by standard MSDOS. It was just a clone. The ISO of a CDROM is standardized too. USB drive behavior is not very standard, so an IMG or DD type file captured from a particular device can not be expected to perform indentically unless it is restored in an identical way to the original device or an equivalent device which has no show-stopping dissimilarity. Since the beginning until just recently USB flash drives were sold pre-formatted with FAT32. Now they are just getting too big for FAT32, so over 32GB has NTFS. Now not always will most of the drives in the world have been originally formatted with very Microsoft-compatible procedures. At least one major supplier has a fundamental formatting error propagated for years. Different mainboards will tolerate this to different degrees. Depending on what you start with the image you capture might not be the best to rely on. Defragmentation can also be an issue to work around. A Live Linux distribution intended for direct _burning_ to flash drives is not a good distribution method compared to burning the ISO to disk. Rufus is good because it takes a bootable ISO and writes it in a file-based way onto just about any USB device, and various USB drives end up more bootable than you can get from perfectly copying a prepared master image bitwise.

brian_herman 6y ago

i wonder how this compares to rufus?

watersb 6y ago
Rufus is great, but Windows only.
- brian_herman 6y ago
  yeah maybe i should give this a try then

keaneu 6y ago

It just says "USB image writer has stopped working" when trying to create a backup image file from device (on Win10 Pro here).

mumblerino 6y ago

Side note: macOS ships with Disk Utility, which as far as I know can do exactly this, relatively easily, so I don’t think you need 3rd-party software.

reportgunner 6y ago
Same with linux and dd
shock 6y ago
GNOME Disks can also write an image to a disk.

SyneRyder 6y ago

Suggestion for the developer if they see this - please add a PayPal or other donation option in addition to BTC. Just a bit too much friction on BTC for normals/muggles like me, but if there was a PayPal link you might have had money in your account by now. I want to support this just because of what it represents - native app development, small executables, tools that are optimized. None of this bloated Electron junk. I bet they could even put some Etcher like graphics / PNGs into this interface and it would still be 100x smaller than Etcher. I wonder if it would be possible to port this natively to Haiku too?

pjmlp 6y ago

Kids this is how one does cross platform properly since the early days of computing, without Electron fat.

tinus_hn 6y ago

Does this produce bootable drives? Thought you needed al kinds of custom stuff for that.

lomkju 6y ago

dd is just 79K As simple as sudo dd if=name-of-iso.iso of=/dev/sdb status="progress" https://medium.com/@tbeach/use-unix-dd-command-to-os-bootable-on-usb-drive-6671945d95a6 https://medium.com/@tbeach/use-unix-dd-command-to-os-bootabl... You're Welcome.

pantalaimon 6y ago
Actually you can just use cp cp name-of-iso.iso /dev/sdb
- charlesdaniels 6y ago
  If you care about showing the progress pv < input.iso > /dev/sdX Is a more portable way to do that, as "status=progress" is a GNU modification to dd, as I recall. Of course the most portable is to use one of the POSIX mainstays like cat or cp.
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  cat foo.iso > /dev/sdb

mehrdadn 6y ago

Related projects I know of (might be useful if someone can point out salient differences): - Rufus: https://rufus.ie/ https://rufus.ie/ - UNetbootin: https://unetbootin.github.io/ https://unetbootin.github.io/ - Win32 Disk Imager: https://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/

noxer 6y ago
- YUMI https://www.pendrivelinux.com/yumi-multiboot-usb-creator/ https://www.pendrivelinux.com/yumi-multiboot-usb-creator/ - Ventoy https://www.ventoy.net https://www.ventoy.net usbimager_1.0.4-i686-win-gdi crashes without error and leaves a USB corrupt (works fine again after a format)
joezydeco 6y ago
Win32DiskImager has been my go-to writer (for Windows hosts) for a decade now. 44MB and does the job exactly the way I want.