Etcher Download

Balena Etcher

Etcher is free and open-source software for formatting removable USB storage media and creating bootable disks for many operating systems. Etcher was developed by Balena. Because of that, some people call it BalenaEtcher. The program is distinguished by ease of use, high speed of operation, and supports a multilingual interface. You can download the program on the developer's website. The page contains links for downloading the standard version of Etcher, and the portable Etcher portable, which does not differ in anything except the name of the executable file and the location for storing the settings. The program settings include the language used and the settings for checking for updates. The standard version stores these parameters in the registry, and the portable version - in the Etcher.ini file program directory. Etcher does not require installation on the system. To use Etcher, all you have to do is, just download the executable file and run it. The program interface is very simple.

In general, Etcher is not unique in the field of bootable media creation tools but its main advantage is its ease of use. To create a bootable flash drive with its help, it is enough to have the original image of the bootable system and be able to press the "Start" button. All selected parameters and settings, by default, are already designed to use the program to work on a computer with a standard configuration. The easiest and most convenient way to use Etcher is to create a bootable USB flash drive (bootable USB disk) from ISO images of Windows or Linux installation disks, as well as system rescue disks and diagnostic tools.

When creating a bootable Windows flash drive, you just need to select the device to which the recording will be performed and the bootable iso image file. The program will substitute other parameters itself. If there is no ISO file available, then it can be created based on a physical CD (or from a set of distribution files) using DVD burner programs such as the well-known Nero, or the free CDBurnerXP or ImgBurn.

Etcher Download

The procedure for creating a bootable USB flash drive with Etcher is as follows:

1. First of all, select a flash drive to which the image will be copied. Unlike many similar programs, Etcher displays the volume label, drive letter, and volume, so if there are several removable drives in the system, it is easy to choose the one to write to.

2. After that, select the partition scheme and the type of system interface. Etcher allows you to create flash drives for booting in the regular BIOS interface and for booting in the UEFI environment, create boot records for MBR volumes and GPT volumes. By default, the "MBR for computers with BIOS or UEFI" mode is selected. This is the most common mode for bootable flash drives today.

3. Select the file system that will be used on the created bootable flash drive. By default, the FAT32 file system is used for bootable Windows flash drive, but if necessary, you can select NTFS if you need to use files larger than 4 GB.

4. Set the cluster size. The cluster size is selected by the program based on the image data and the file system type, but if necessary, you can change it.

5. After that, specify the volume label that will be assigned to the created flash drive.

6. Now it is time to set the formatting options. It is best to leave these options as default and simply select the ISO image file. For images created with dd on Linux, you must select the DD Image option

7. After clicking the Start button, the program will format the flash drive, set the active partition flag, write the master boot record and boot record of the partition, as well as the data of the bootable media from the ISO image. Once Etcher is finished, you can boot using the resulting bootable flash drive.