ETCHER

Flash. Flawless.

Flash OS images to SD cards & USB drives, safely and easily.
Flash, Flawless. This gif shows the steps you take to flash with Etcher, select image, select drive, flash!Download Etcher

Why balenaEtcher?

Here at balena we have thousands of users working through our getting started process, we found there was no easy way for our users to flash an SD card that we could recommend to everyone.

So we built Etcher, an SD card flasher app that is simple for end users, extensible for developers, and works on any platform.
  • Create USB installation media from bootable ISOs
  • Install almost any OS to almost any flash drive
  • Offer an easy way for your users to flash your OS using our ‘Flash with Etcher’ feature
Read more on our blog

FEATURES

A better way to burn

Validated Flashing

Etcher confirms that your flash has completed, enjoy peace of mind that your card will boot and isn’t corrupted.
Hard Drive Friendly
Etcher gives you warnings and hides your system drives by default to avoid accidentally wiping your entire hard-drive.
Beautiful Interface
Who said flashing SD cards has to be an eyesore. Etcher has an intuitive 3-step process with no command lines!
Open Source
Made with JS, HTML, node.js and Electron. Etcher is built on open source tools and is and always will be free and open source to use!
Cross Platform
Works for everyone whether you are on Windows, Linux or Mac with no complicated install instructions.
Simultaneous Writing
Using balena EtcherPro you can flash up to 16 drives at once. Find out more here.
DOWNLOAD

Download Etcher

Commmunity

Get involved with the Etcher community

Forums

If you have a question about Etcher, or are a fan of Etcher and want to help other users troubleshoot their issues, join us in our forum!

Go to forums

Contribute

BalenaEtcher is and always will be free and open sourced, it is maintained by balena staff but we welcome contributions from the community.

Go to GitHub

Flash with Etcher

Your users can now easily install your OS straight from your website, add the flash with Etcher button to your site or blog to get started.

Get the code

The Etcher you love,
the perfect hardware

EtcherPro is a stand-alone hardware device that allows you to write to multiple cards or usb disks at once, at extreme speeds.
This image shows the Etcher pro using the Etcher software to flash 16 devices at once

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is my drive not bootable?

Etcher copies images to drives byte by byte, without doing any transformation to the final device, which means images that require special treatment to be made bootable, like Windows images, will not work out of the box. In these cases, the general advice is to use software specific to those kind of images, usually available from the image publishers themselves. You can find more information here.

How can I configure persistent storage?

Some programs, usually oriented at making GNU/Linux live USB drives, include an option to set persistent storage. This is currently not supported by Etcher, so if you require this functionality, we advise to fallback to UNetbootin.

How can I deactivate desktop shortcut prompt on GNU/Linux?

This is a feature provided by AppImages, where the applications prompts the user to automatically register a desktop shortcut to easily access the application. Follow the steps you can find here

How do I flash Ubuntu ISOs

Ubuntu images (and potentially some other related GNU/Linux distributions) have a peculiar format that allows the image to boot without any further modification from both CDs and USB drives.A consequence of this enhancement is that some programs, like parted get confused about the drive's format and partition table, printing warnings such as:/dev/xxx contains GPT signatures, indicating that it has a GPT table. However, it does not have a valid fake msdos partition table, as it should. Perhaps it was corrupted -- possibly by a program that doesn't understand GPT partition tables. Or perhaps you deleted the GPT table, and are now using an msdos partition table. Is this a GPT partition table? Both the primary and backup GPT tables are corrupt. Try making a fresh table, and using Parted's rescue feature to recover partitions.Warning: The driver descriptor says the physical block size is 2048 bytes, but Linux says it is 512 bytes.All these warnings are safe to ignore, and your drive should be able to boot without any problems.Refer to the following message from Ubuntu's mailing list if you want to learn more.

How do I run Etcher on Wayland?

Electron is based on Gtk2, which can't run natively on Wayland. Fortunately, the XWayland Server provides backwards compatibility to run any X client on Wayland, including Etcher.
This usually works out of the box on mainstream GNU/Linux distributions that properly support Wayland. If it doesn't, make sure the xwayland.so module is being loaded by declaring it in your weston.ini:[core]modules=xwayland.so

What are the runtime GNU/LINUX dependencies?

This entry aims to provide an up to date list of runtime dependencies needed to run Etcher on a GNU/Linux system.

How can I recover the broken drive?

Sometimes, things might go wrong, and you end up with a half-flashed drive that is unusable by your operating systems, and common graphical tools might even refuse to get it back to a normal state.To solve these kinds of problems, we've collected a list of fail-proof methods to completely erase your drive in major operating systems.

I receive ”No polkit authentication agent found” error in GNU/Linux

Etcher requires an available polkit authentication agent in your system in order to show a secure password prompt dialog to perform elevation. Make sure you have one installed for the desktop environment of your choice.

May I run Etcher in older macOS versions?