I literally fully wiped and reinstalled my windows because I thought something was corrupt causing balena to just sit at “starting…” Installed a few different versions. Then as I was going through my backups I found the original installer that I started using balena which was 1.7.3 so I installed that and it all works fine now.
Remember to turn off auto-update and just keep 1.7.3
Welcome to the balena forums @dsstrainer, and thank you for posting this.
What we’re still missing is which versions actually failed. You mentioned installing a few, and knowing exactly which ones sat at “Starting…” would narrow this down a lot, because plenty changed between 1.7.x and the 2.x line in how Etcher runs the write on Windows.
I’d also like to ask you to test the latest version, 2.1.6, on your machine and tell us whether it gets past “Starting…”: Release v2.1.6 · balena-io/etcher · GitHub . It may be one you already tried, since it came out in May. We would highly appreciate your help to debug and find the problem you faced, because yours is a setup that reproduces it and we have not managed to trigger it here.
For anyone else reading this thread: we maintain Etcher continuously, and the recent releases are more secure and safer to use than the older ones. It’s worth staying on a current version rather than settling on an old one.
Best regards
Harald