I am trying to flash an img of SteamOS (7gb) onto a thumb drive, I’ve also tried with a micro SD. Both time I get the img ready and hit flash, it shows flashing at 0% and an ETA of over 700 minutes. The eta and % never change. It’s been sitting on 0% for 15 minutes now. I’m on macOS
Hello, can you provide a link to the image you are trying to flash? If it is compressed or zipped, have you tried unzipping it first prior to flashing?
I had the exact same problem, also with SteamOS, and I, too, was trying to flash the SteamOS .bz2 directly instead of extracting it first and flashing the .img.
And I’m not alone! https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/11uwwkd/balenaetcher_steamos_reimage_flash_stuck_at_0/
Lots of people are having this issue.
This seems like a bug in balenaEtcher. It shouldn’t just get stuck at 0% when I foolishly provide a zipped file; it should fail with an error message.
I should have read these forums before purchasing
Registered just to comment & bump.
Same here almost a year later, a tonne more posts on that reddit thread.
Balena really should flag invalid formats.
Hey, so I just burned two hours testing different SD cards and such thinking that it was maybe my USB port, my USB-SD adapter, or the card itself. Since Balena Etcher happily continues to accept file formats that it cannot or will not properly handle.
Please please please please please….. display an error if the file format isn’t one that BE can handle or if it doesn’t match a known pattern. It will save SO MUCH TIME AND HEADACHE since many sites will make the file downloadable in a compressed format. This helps to double as a sanity check against accidental corruption.
Case in point, a WIC file that is BZipped. Balena Etcher accepts it happily and identifies it as a WIC file. Okay… select device, flash….. and after a short burst it drops to zero. And hangs there. No error. No indication of problems.
It wasn’t until I found this thread that I realized…. maybe… just maybe… BE can’t handle compressed files… decompressed the file and BE finally worked.
Please put an error message popup. Other than this weirdness, BE works well.
Note, people should not be punished because they only image things infrequently. I understand that once one has figured it out, it won’t be a problem next time…. but that only applies if you do this fairly regularly. Once every year type task, though? Painful.
Made an account just to bump this, Steam’s own commandline recommendation uses the uncompressed archive that the download gives you for steamOS. Most ISO’s are just the straight up file, but this one was a bit wonky and an error would have been appreciated rather than just sitting on 0% making me feel like an idiot.