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Comment by nemosaltat | Hacker News Reader

The “simple GUI” tool I keep seeing pushed Maker forums is Etcher. I needed to flash something from my work PC so I gave it a shot- 90MB of Electron bloat, while offering no extra functionality over dd . Plus, dd doesn’t advertise to me during the flash, and certainly doesn’t phone home to balena.

For folks just getting started or more comfortable with a GUI, I’d recommend giving USBimager[0] a look. It does exactly what’d you’d expect based on the name, it performant, and they have native apps. No affiliation, just a fan of a KISS app done right.

[0] https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/usbimager

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I can also recommend Fedora Media Writer[0]. It can, despite the name, install other images too and it's fairly intuetive.

[0] https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.fedoraproject.MediaWrit...

There's also Rufus, sadly it's Windows-only.

Woeusb is pretty decent on linux, and does the same uefi-ntfs magic that Rufus does, and that you'll need if you're burning a large ISO like recent Windows ones.

Though if it's just for ISOs, ventoy is fantastic, just drag and drop the file and no burning at all :)

> that you'll need if you're burning a large ISO like recent Windows ones.

I ran into this very issue when trying to make a bootable Windows 10 USB on macOS. No amount of fiddling with dd, unetbootin or Etcher resulted in a bootable USB. Despite being principled about it, I had to admit defeat and just pulled an old <4GB Windows 10 iso and flashed that to the stick.

I know I could have installed Linux through a virtual machine and got it done that way, but that seemed horrible overkill. Oh well.

Double click iso to mount it, format usb as fat32 or exfat, copy and paste contents of mounted iso to usb drive

This has always worked for me to boot UEFI installers

The issue is fat32 only supports files that are up to 4GB in size.

Recent windows ISOs have a file that is >4GB, so you can't have the partition formatted as f32.

exfat isn't compatible with uefi.

Yeah, Win10_20H2_English_x64.iso is UDF these days, which doesn't have the ISO 9660 file size limitation of ~4GiB. Basically same as FAT32.

These are the two largest files in that image.

    5.0G    ./sources/install.wim
    534M    ./sources/boot.wim

I wonder how Microsoft's media creation tool deals with this...

You can do it by hand with the dism tool like so,

    Dism /Split-Image /ImageFile:C:\folder_name\sources\install.wim /SWMFile:C:\folder_name\sources\install.swm /FileSize:3800

I copied that from a ZDnet article with more details. Wasn't sure about posting the URL but searching will find it.

The esd file that the media creation tool downloads and then immediately deletes after creating the USB stick, has a smaller version of this file.

    4.0G ./sources/install.esd  
    381M ./sources/boot.wim

You are right about exfat, what about NTFS? I suppose that's the issue though with macos diskutility no supporting NTFS out of the box. Honestly the other suggestion to use ventoy is probably the best option. Such a great utility

As far as I know motherboard manufacturers have the option of implementing NTFS support in their UEFI, but it's nowhere near ubiquitous.

Etcher is extra bad on Macos. Populating the file chooser dialog took minutes. I have no idea how it could be this wrong.

While we're all making recommendations, I really like Popsicle[0]. Does what it says, and nothing more.

[0] https://github.com/pop-os/popsicle

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