Etcher: an excellent tool for creating bootable discs

etcher-logo-icon

Linux has many variants which makes it a very interesting system, that, unlike Windows or Mac users, do not have many options in terms of maintaining the same system line.

Si you are an adventurer who likes to try different systems among your repertoire of tools you have to count forcibly any application or utility that helps you record images of the systems that you download.

There are many tools to create bootable discs, although many of these are time consuming and some are difficult to implement. Of all, they are loaded with more options that are confusing for beginners.

That is why the day of today we are going to talk about an application who will support us with this work by making it simple to do.

About Etcher

Es a built tool exclusively in open source technologies such as JS, HTML, node.js and Electron to ensure that flashing an SD card or USB drive is a pleasant and safe experience.

What makes interesting Etcher of various tools similar to it is that this protects the user from accidentally writing to their hard drives, ensures every byte of data has been typed correctly, and much more.

This makes it an excellent option for the novice user.

Etcher is a free and open source application that is quite simple to use and it works on any platform including Linux, Windows and Mac.

This application is maintained and managed by the resin.io team , the team behind Resin OS, which adapts to the needs of IoT.

Etcher supports many image formats different: ISO, IMG, RAW, BZ2, DMG, DSK, ETCH, GZ, HDDIMG, XZ and ZIP.

Once the image is written, Etcher validates the results to make sure it worked correctly, although this function can take a little time, so if you prefer you can disable the validation in the Etcher configuration options.

How to install Etcher on Linux?

Etcher

Si want to use this great tool To save the images of your preferred systems on your removable devices you must do the following.

The first thing is that let's go to the website of the application where we can obtain the AppImage file in its download section, the link is this.

Once the download is done, we will give the file execution permissions, for this we are going to open a terminal and we are going to execute:

cd Downloads
chmod a+x Etcher-linux-x64.AppImage

Done this we can start using the applicationWe can do it in two ways either by double clicking on the file and it will be executed.

Or from the terminal we can execute the following command, to launch the application:

./Etcher-linux-x64.AppImage

How to use Etcher?

The tool interface it is very intuitive so its use should not represent any problem, not even for the novice.

But anyway its form of use is as follows:

  • Insert a USB or SD drive into the computer, this drive should already be formatted and contain no data.
  • Click on the "Select Image" button and navigate to the system image you want to flash.
  • Etcher will automatically select a USB drive to write, if you have more than one drive inserted, they should click the switch link under the drive and choose the correct one.
  • Finally, they must click on "Flash".
  • Once this is done, they must enter their password to give Etcher permission to write to the USB drive.
  • The image will now be written to the USB drive and a progress bar will tell you how far along the process is.

After the end of this process part, the next thing is that Etcher goes through an image verification process, so they should not remove the drive until the entire process is complete and it says it is safe to remove the drive.


3 comments, leave yours

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  1.   luix said

    excellent tool, a pity that it is based on electron,

  2.   Aaron M. said

    Balenaetcher.online is a simple and intuitive utility to create bootable drives and format your old PC.

    Incredible work from the Balena developers, congratulations to the entire team.

  3.   Serywo said

    Hi, thanks for the postage, after a week trying to install etcher, I finally succeeded, thanks again.

    regards