Guys, I have a 16 Gb pendrive and when I use the balenaetcher, the resulting space after flash it is only 2 Gb. Is it possible to reserve a space before to flash?
Hi, when balenaEtcher flashes a devices, it copies the partition table from the ISO file. This results with some partitions on the device to be small or unreadable for some operating systems depending on the ISO file that you used. And because it copies the entire partition table, we are not able to reserve any space.
You may also need to follow this guide if you want to reset the partition table on your device after you are done using it to flash a device.
t seems that there is no way to reserve a space before saving the iso file to the pendrive. I managed to do it through unetbutin despite being a lot slower than BalenaEtcher. And it also seems to me that even Rufus cannot book this space.
I am very grateful for having answered me.
So if I understand you correctly, you’re trying to increase the partition size of the ISO file to fit the size of the pen drive before you flash it? That functionality is not built into etcher (although we could potentially add it)…can you tell me what your use case for this is so I can see if there is reasonable cause to add this functionality?
I would like to reserve a space in the pendrive before to start flashing the iso into the pendrive, like we can do with unetbutin.
Hi, balenaEtcher was designed to flash the image into the SD Card or USB without modification to the partitioning of the image. balenaEtcher has also been optimized to make copying the images really fast. This approach works for most cases where you only need to have a USB flasher/installer or an OS image for booting up an IoT device. balenaEtcher was made to reduce the friction for fleet owners that have to write hundreds or thousands of SD cards for their fleet of IoT devices. It just happened to be really simple to use for many use-cases.
Unetbootin, as they have described in their docs, extracts the images, places the files into the drive, then sets a bootloader in the device. Because they copy the files extracted from the image, the user has the option to manage the partitioning on the target device. This is what makes them different from balenaEtcher and is effective for use-cases such as yours.
Feel free to use Unetbootin for your specific use-case. We will continue to improve on balenaEtcher and you will always have an option depending on what you need. 