Using Etcher tool to flash emonSD image to SD card

Jon · 2016-10-03T21:43:41.017Z

The recent issue of MagPi (Issue 50 October 2016) includes an article about Etcher. Etcher is a free app for burning an image to a SD Card. Downloads are available for Mac, Linux and Windows. I don’t know much about the company but the Etcher app seems to work very well (and fast) on a Mac.

If you wish to look thru the source code before running Etcher, the code is available at:

GitHub

GitHub - balena-io/etcher: Flash OS images to SD cards & USB drives,...

Flash OS images to SD cards & USB drives, safely and easily. - GitHub - balena-io/etcher: Flash OS images to SD cards & USB drives, safely and easily.

glyn.hudson · 2016-10-04T00:01:54.989Z

Looks nice, have you tested?

I’ll add a link to the emonPi emonSD wiki.

Jon · 2016-10-04T00:12:15.000Z

I created an emonSD image earlier today and will give it a test tomorrow.

Jon · 2016-10-04T14:39:23.403Z

All seems to be woking very well!
I downloaded and burned the emonSD-03May16 image using Etcher. All looks a-OK. I plugged the freshly baked SD card into a spare RasPi (no emonPi board) and all booted as expected. I tried to Import my backup data but ran out of /data space. I ran the emonSDexpand and expanded /data to fill the new 8GB SD. Did another Import and all of my Inputs and Feeds seemed to be A-OK.

FYIs about Etcher:

This is a beta and there are changes that happen every few weeks.

github.com

balena-io/etcher/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md

# Change Log

All notable changes to this project will be documented in this file.
This project adheres to [Semantic Versioning](http://semver.org/).

# v1.6.0
## (2021-09-20)

* Add support for basic auth when downloading images from URL. [Marco Füllemann]
* patch: Update etcher-sdk from v6.2.1 to v6.2.5 [Lorenzo Alberto Maria Ambrosi]
* Update Makefile to Apple M1 info [David Gaspar]
* Add LED settings for potentially different hardware [Lorenzo Alberto Maria Ambrosi]

# v1.5.122
## (2021-09-02)

* Restore image file selection LED-drive pathing [Lorenzo Alberto Maria Ambrosi]
* Update scripts submodule [Lorenzo Alberto Maria Ambrosi]
* Change LEDs colours [Lorenzo Alberto Maria Ambrosi]
* Windows images now show the proper warning again [Lorenzo Alberto Maria Ambrosi]

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Nice feature: Includes a progress bar

Screen Shot 2016-10-04 at 7.53.00 AM.png1824×984 74.1 KB

AND does a validation at the end of the burn. (no image - sorry)

Look for this screen when complete:

Screen Shot 2016-10-04 at 8.00.08 AM.png1824×984 81.8 KB

EngIcaro · 2017-03-02T13:05:49.897Z

I already have an image on the SD card. Do I need to format in fat32 or does etcher already do this?

daturach · 2017-03-02T15:22:32.107Z

Etcher will overwrite whatever you have on your SD card.

A propos, I used to have a problem with Etcher. I opened a bug on Github. They fixed it and sent me an extra build to test. Nice guys!

Walter

Jon · 2017-05-17T20:41:15.690Z

Etcher is real - no longer beta.

balena – 12 May 17

Etcher 1.0 is here!

After completing over a million writes, Etcher exits beta with 1.0 release and new CLI edition Today, Etcher [https://etcher.io] graduates from beta and reaches a big milestone: an official 1.0.0 release! Since we first released Etcher...

glyn.hudson · 2017-11-27T19:37:13.716Z

I’ve just tested, works really great on Linux. I reckon we should recommend it as the preferred tool to flash sd card images. Can someone confirm similar success on Windows and mac?

Jon · 2017-11-27T20:00:32.368Z

glyn.hudson:

Can someone confirm similar success on Windows and mac?

I can confirm for the Mac. I’ve used etcher many times this year.

etcher.balena.io

balenaEtcher - Flash OS images to SD cards & USB drives

A cross-platform tool to flash OS images onto SD cards and USB drives safely and easily. Free and open source for makers around the world.

Robert.Wall · 2017-11-28T23:14:42.182Z

It is worth noting that Etcher can use the downloaded zip file directly. It is not necessary to extract the image first.

Paul · 2017-11-28T23:18:03.075Z

I’ve used it many times in Windows, and has worked perfectly for me, and that includes quite a few emoncms image files.

Paul

glyn.hudson · 2017-11-29T13:27:18.196Z

Robert.Wall:

It is worth noting that Etcher can use the downloaded zip file directly. It is not necessary to extract the image first

That’s very cool.

Thanks for the feedback guys have added a note to the download page to make etcher the recommended method