Etcher stuck on starting screen on MacOS Catalina

I’m trying to flash a program onto an SD card on my MacOS Catalina. When I go through all the steps and click the flash option, it takes me to the loading screen as it should, but nothing happens and the status bar is stuck at “Starting…”. I’ve let it sit for nearly a day and it still hasn’t actually loaded, like it’s frozen.

Sorry to hear about these troubles @sirdoes – were you able to get this working? If not, the first thing to check is the Developer Tools, and post the logs here. The Developer Tools can be opened by Command-Option-I, and start the flashing process. Then paste them here for us to have a look. Thanks!

I"m seeing the same thing. Appears to be Catalina (10.15.7) related. Works fine on a Mac with Monterey (12.2.1). On the Monterey machine, after hitting start, it prompts for the password for access. This does not happen on Catalina; it just sits at “starting” forever. Log dump attached also screen capture.

Etcher-dump.log (5.2 KB)

Thanks.

Daryl

Without looking at your Etcher-dump.log, this seems like exactly the issue I had dealt with hear:

Thanks Peter. It did have access to “Files and Folders” but per your suggestion I gave it “Full Disk Access” and checked the box. Still stuck at “Starting”. The Log consistently shows a “failed to load resource” error. As mentioned, Balena works fine on Monterey and older versions worked on this Catalina machine.

FYI - downloaded and tested Raspberry Pi Imager on same system, works fine.

Hi,

I remember having a similar issue some time ago, but I can’t remember how I fixed it, although. I do remember making it work. I’ve done some search around and found this blog post that gives a workaround.
Tl;dr ,a permission thing in Catalina that can be workaround by executing sudo /Applications/balenaEtcher.app/Contents/MacOS/balenaEtcher

3 Likes

THANK YOU! I made an account on the forums just to say thank you and this worked for me!

PERFECT!
I just signedup here to say thank YOU! :slight_smile:

can you explain why the permission set in BIGSUR sexurity settings doesn’t work but to start etcher via Terminal and “sudo”?

Entering your computer-admin password seems to be insufficient. Running an admin login session and retrying works for me. (Monterey, Apple Silicon)

Thanks, I think the Devs may still need to look at this. Frustrating that we need to use the command line to make the app work!

this worked tysm!!!

THANK YOU! I made an account on the forums just to say thank you and this worked for me!
But why have to go through the command line to give superuser permissions using SUDO when we give him in the system settings?
(macOS Monterey)