One other thing I’d like to share based on my experience flashing removable media:
Successful flashing is highly dependent on the quality of the media.
Working with the Raspberry Pi, (and other things like that), I have discovered that cheap, no-name, (or bizarro-name knock-offs), generally aren’t worth the trouble to use them. They may file copy for a while, but sooner or later - usually sooner - they die.
If I spend five bucks on an el-cheapo microSD card, it’s an even-money bet that it won’t “etch” properly.
If I spend Real Money on highly rated, name brand cards, they “etch” without issues, every single time. So much so that I use Etcher as an ad-hoc quality test for the card: If it has problems with Etcher, I only use it for things I don’t care about - or toss it.
Even some name brands give Etcher, and I, problems. Particularly Kingston and PNY, which are re-branders, not manufacturers, Sandisk and Toshiba drives have been ultra-reliable. Interestingly enough, the Micro Center store-brand drives are also good. (Go figure, maybe they get them from SanDisk or Toshiba?)
If Etcher is giving you trouble, or if it’s getting stuck, try better - name brand - media.
Hey folks, I’m on version 1.5.109 and face the same issue as the OP. I recollect the older versions of Etcher used to show the SU prompt before the flashing process begins but wonder why is it that the current (and even the prev.) versions have dropped support for it. Doesn’t something like pkexec or the likes work?
Regarding the potential versioning problems, I ALWAYS keep several older version downloads saved just in case an “update” gives me fits. When that happens, I say “punt this!” and drop back a version or two.
@theGeekyLad this was never dropped.
Etcher will elevate the writer process (unless you’re already running it as root).
It uses sudo-prompt which uses pkexec.
I found a fix for me. I had been doing several flashes for raspberry pi’s. The last time I just grabbed a regular usb to micro sd and it was stuck, no matter what I did.
When I ordered a nicer usb to micro sd it flashed just fine. I think the cheaper adapters don’t work well for flashing. Just my 2 cents.
I am also facing the same issue with 1.5.116 in windows 10 64 bit. The below is my Windows version details.
|Edition|Windows 10 Pro|
|Version|20H2|
|OS build|19042.928|
|Experience|Windows Feature Experience Pack 120.2212.551.0|
My hero! I was getting kind of crazy because it worked for me yesterday (but I had some other amature issures with my PI) so I tried it again today like a thousend times and it always got stuck. After reading your post I slightly changed the position of my adapter and unplugged all other cables and TADAAA it is working again. Thank you!
I’ve been doing a lot of testing lately and that involves flashing, re-flashing, and re-re-re-flashing micro-SD media.
I have been doing copies from the SD card and verification of the system image after first-boot in a Raspberry Pi.
Last night - right outta nowhere - things went sour and they went sour badly
I would use Etcher, (on Windows), to create the media and then run it once on my test system to “wake up” the image and re-expand the filesystem to fit the device. After doing all that, I would plug the micro SD card into a Mint 19.3 virtual machine to verify that things expanded correctly and to verify that there are no errors with the filesystem.
There I am, with my el-Cheapo $2 microSD/USB adapter. . .
(Here’s my el-cheapo adapter on my “Russified” Genuine Raspberry Pi Keyboard.)
. . . and trying to verify the ext4 filesystem on the second partition, when totally out of nowhere I start getting Directory Inode 411067, Block #0, offset 0: directory corrupted errors.
I immediately aborted and re-tried the device in the Raspberry Pi - and it’s toast.
I try again - flash, boot, (it works), test, (it fails again), reboot, whereupon it’s toast, but ONLY after I ran e2fsck -fDv /dev/sdb2 on my test system. And to make it worse, it doesn’t fail ALL the time, just often enough that my entire month’s test schedule is now Veal Scallopini.
After a long process of elimination on my systems, I narrowed the problem down to that MicroSD - USB adapter dongle. (I eventually found another MicroSD reader and things are fine.)
The takeaway here is that, as a general rule when it comes to data handling, cheap = AWFUL and UNRELIABLE.
I have said this on the Dexter Industries forums a zillion times: You are NOT being paid to perform reliability testing on cheaply made hardware - that should be done by the manufacturer and not by YOU.
Spend the extra money and get a good brand that won’t give you fits.
Now I have to go out and spend some serious money on a SanDisk branded adapter. . .
It won’t be cheap, but it won’t die on me and leave me wracking my brains out all night wondering what happened - and it won’t invalidate months of work corrupting images.
That scares me. . . .
I would stop right where you are and look at the quality of the connections to your adapter and “all other cables” and find out which one is causing the problem. Murphy’s Law is just as real as Pavlov’s Law, (and I think they went to the same university together ), and you WILL get bitten if you don’t take the time to track this down right now.
Hey. I have a problem. I downloaded Etcher version 1.7.1 on my 32-bit Windows 7 PC. There weren’t any problems with the installation and the application opened. It had a blank window for 25 minutes until I decided to restart my PC. I tried opening up the application again and it just wont. Would you please help me?
Hi @gwen – To begin with, try disabling any Antivirus or Windows Defender security settings, and also try running it as Administrator, and let’s see if that helps get it launched. Thanks!
Having the same stuck on starting problem while trying to flash an ISO to a 64 GB USB flash drive with Etcher 1.7.0 on MacOS 10.15.7 (Catalina) running on Intel architecture. Etcher hung indefinitely (15 + minutes before I gave up) when I opened the application normally. Solved the problem as follows:
open Terminal application
sudo /bin/bash
cd /Applications/balenaEtcher.app/Contents/MacOS
./balenaEtcher
Doing this resulted in Etcher successfully completing the operation in a couple of minutes.
Created an account to say that I had a similar issue running Windows 10 10.0.19042 Build 19042 and what fixed the ‘Starting…’ issue for me was running Etcher in administrator mode.
Confusingly though, now the problem I have is that occasionally the application will freeze. This happens around 50% of the time, and the only fix I have is to kill the process and try again.
I am also having this issue.
I am running balenaEtcher-Portable-1.7.8 on Windows 10 Version 21H1 (Build 19043.1645). I have tried running as administrator, but it still gets stuck in the Starting… phase.
MicroSD - USB adapter dongle. (I eventually found another MicroSD reader and things are fine.)
