Etcher drive list is inconsistent with drivelist list

balenaEtcher
1

Hello,
I discovered Etcher from this tutorial on how to install a bootable Ubuntu instance on a USB stick. I have an external hard drive I made a partition on in hopes of flashing an ISO onto using Etcher, but I don’t see it when Etcher lists drives.

I understand that Etcher uses https://github.com/balena-io-modules/drivelist to list drives, so I ran the following code locally after running npm install --save drivelist:

async function fetchDrives(){
  const drivelist = require('drivelist');

  const drives = await drivelist.list();
  console.log(drives.length);
};

fetchDrives();

This code returns 5, which is great. Etcher displays 2 drives in the “Select a Drive” menu, and neither is the drive I’m looking for.

I am running MacOS 10.14.6 and Etcher v1.5.60. This data is logged in the console when I open it:
Tue Oct 22 2019 18:29:33 GMT-0500 (CDT) Open modal ({"name":"drive-selector","applicationSessionUuid":"d61ccc7a-a240-461b-ab49-cfae698d4076","flashingWorkflowUuid":"d4a1bc1c-6e7c-4a6f-b618-cf31603acc72","sample":0.1})

3

Hey, I expect the reason your external hard drive is not showing is due to etcher hiding hard drives by default to help avoid people accidentally overwriting their operating system. You can go into settings (the cog in the top right) and enable unsafe mode in order to allow hard drives to show however be warned that you need to be extra careful as it disables the default protections and so if you choose the wrong device you may be capable of overwriting your main drive

5

That’s very helpful! Thank you for the advice!

7

No problem