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The “simple GUI” tool I keep seeing pushed Maker forums is Etcher. I needed to flash something from my work PC so I gave it a shot- 90MB of Electron bloat, whil

The “simple GUI” tool I keep seeing pushed Maker forums is Etcher. I needed to flash something from my work PC so I gave it a shot- 90MB of Electron bloat, while offering no extra functionality over dd . Plus, dd doesn’t advertise to me during the flash, and certainly doesn’t phone home to balena. For folks just getting started or more comfortable with a GUI, I’d recommend giving USBimager[0] a look. It does exactly what’d you’d expect based on the name, it performant, and they have native apps. No affiliation, just a fan of a KISS app done right. [0] https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/usbimager https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/usbimager

trinix912 6y ago
There's also Rufus, sadly it's Windows-only.
- ccmcarey 6y ago
  Woeusb is pretty decent on linux, and does the same uefi-ntfs magic that Rufus does, and that you'll need if you're burning a large ISO like recent Windows ones. Though if it's just for ISOs, ventoy is fantastic, just drag and drop the file and no burning at all :)
  - jorvi 6y ago
    > that you'll need if you're burning a large ISO like recent Windows ones. I ran into this very issue when trying to make a bootable Windows 10 USB on macOS. No amount of fiddling with dd, unetbootin or Etcher resulted in a bootable USB. Despite being principled about it, I had to admit defeat and just pulled an old <4GB Windows 10 iso and flashed that to the stick. I know I could have installed Linux through a virtual machine and got it done that way, but that seemed horrible overkill. Oh well.
    - moondev 6y ago
      Double click iso to mount it, format usb as fat32 or exfat, copy and paste contents of mounted iso to usb drive This has always worked for me to boot UEFI installers
      - ccmcarey 6y ago
        The issue is fat32 only supports files that are up to 4GB in size. Recent windows ISOs have a file that is >4GB, so you can't have the partition formatted as f32. exfat isn't compatible with uefi.
        cmurf 6y ago
        Yeah, Win10_20H2_English_x64.iso is UDF these days, which doesn't have the ISO 9660 file size limitation of ~4GiB. Basically same as FAT32. These are the two largest files in that image. 5.0G ./sources/install.wim 534M ./sources/boot.wim I wonder how Microsoft's media creation tool deals with this...
        zlynx 6y ago
        You can do it by hand with the dism tool like so, Dism /Split-Image /ImageFile:C:\folder_name\sources\install.wim /SWMFile:C:\folder_name\sources\install.swm /FileSize:3800 I copied that from a ZDnet article with more details. Wasn't sure about posting the URL but searching will find it.
        cmurf 6y ago
        The esd file that the media creation tool downloads and then immediately deletes after creating the USB stick, has a smaller version of this file. 4.0G ./sources/install.esd 381M ./sources/boot.wim
        moondev 6y ago
        You are right about exfat, what about NTFS? I suppose that's the issue though with macos diskutility no supporting NTFS out of the box. Honestly the other suggestion to use ventoy is probably the best option. Such a great utility
        ccmcarey 6y ago
        As far as I know motherboard manufacturers have the option of implementing NTFS support in their UEFI, but it's nowhere near ubiquitous.
sp1rit 6y ago
I can also recommend Fedora Media Writer[0]. It can, despite the name, install other images too and it's fairly intuetive. [0] https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.fedoraproject.MediaWriter https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.fedoraproject.MediaWrit...
Shared404 6y ago
While we're all making recommendations, I really like Popsicle[0]. Does what it says, and nothing more. [0] https://github.com/pop-os/popsicle https://github.com/pop-os/popsicle
dubya 6y ago
Etcher is extra bad on Macos. Populating the file chooser dialog took minutes. I have no idea how it could be this wrong.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

trinix912 6y ago

There's also Rufus, sadly it's Windows-only.

ccmcarey 6y ago
Woeusb is pretty decent on linux, and does the same uefi-ntfs magic that Rufus does, and that you'll need if you're burning a large ISO like recent Windows ones. Though if it's just for ISOs, ventoy is fantastic, just drag and drop the file and no burning at all :)
- jorvi 6y ago
  > that you'll need if you're burning a large ISO like recent Windows ones. I ran into this very issue when trying to make a bootable Windows 10 USB on macOS. No amount of fiddling with dd, unetbootin or Etcher resulted in a bootable USB. Despite being principled about it, I had to admit defeat and just pulled an old <4GB Windows 10 iso and flashed that to the stick. I know I could have installed Linux through a virtual machine and got it done that way, but that seemed horrible overkill. Oh well.
  - moondev 6y ago
    Double click iso to mount it, format usb as fat32 or exfat, copy and paste contents of mounted iso to usb drive This has always worked for me to boot UEFI installers
    - ccmcarey 6y ago
      The issue is fat32 only supports files that are up to 4GB in size. Recent windows ISOs have a file that is >4GB, so you can't have the partition formatted as f32. exfat isn't compatible with uefi.
      - cmurf 6y ago
        Yeah, Win10_20H2_English_x64.iso is UDF these days, which doesn't have the ISO 9660 file size limitation of ~4GiB. Basically same as FAT32. These are the two largest files in that image. 5.0G ./sources/install.wim 534M ./sources/boot.wim I wonder how Microsoft's media creation tool deals with this...
        zlynx 6y ago
        You can do it by hand with the dism tool like so, Dism /Split-Image /ImageFile:C:\folder_name\sources\install.wim /SWMFile:C:\folder_name\sources\install.swm /FileSize:3800 I copied that from a ZDnet article with more details. Wasn't sure about posting the URL but searching will find it.
        cmurf 6y ago
        The esd file that the media creation tool downloads and then immediately deletes after creating the USB stick, has a smaller version of this file. 4.0G ./sources/install.esd 381M ./sources/boot.wim
      - moondev 6y ago
        You are right about exfat, what about NTFS? I suppose that's the issue though with macos diskutility no supporting NTFS out of the box. Honestly the other suggestion to use ventoy is probably the best option. Such a great utility
        ccmcarey 6y ago
        As far as I know motherboard manufacturers have the option of implementing NTFS support in their UEFI, but it's nowhere near ubiquitous.

sp1rit 6y ago

I can also recommend Fedora Media Writer[0]. It can, despite the name, install other images too and it's fairly intuetive. [0] https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.fedoraproject.MediaWriter https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.fedoraproject.MediaWrit...

Shared404 6y ago

While we're all making recommendations, I really like Popsicle[0]. Does what it says, and nothing more. [0] https://github.com/pop-os/popsicle https://github.com/pop-os/popsicle

dubya 6y ago

Etcher is extra bad on Macos. Populating the file chooser dialog took minutes. I have no idea how it could be this wrong.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]