Creating a Bootable USB Drive using balenaEtcher

balenaEtcher is one of the easiest to use tools for creating bootable USB flash drives.

You will need two things to create a bootable USB flash drive. (1) An image file & (2) a USB flash drive. Once you are having these two things, you are ready to create a bootable USB flash drive.

BalenaEtcher is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS, which means you will no longer have to look for different programs to create bootable USB flash drives on different platforms.

Step 1: Download & install Etcher on Windows 10

Download and install BalenaEtcher for Windows from the following website: balena.io. The installation is straight forward and similar to the installation of any other Windows application.

If you are using Linux, you can download the source code of BalenaEtcher from GitHub https://github.com/balena-io/etcher or from balena.io.

Step 2: Insert a USB drive

Once the installation is complete, insert the USB flash drive and launch the balenaEtcher application.

Step 3: Select the desired image & the connected USB flash drive on balenaEtcher

Next, click ‘Flash from file’ and choose the image file that you want on the USB flash drive. Then click on ‘Select target’ to choose the USB flash drive that is connected to the system.

Step 4: Flash! to create a bootable USB drive

Lastly, click on ‘Flash!’ to create the bootable USB flash drive.

Once the process starts, flashing the USB flash drive will take some time depending upon the size of the bootable image, and the speed of the USB flash drive.

Step 5: Flash Complete, Eject the drive

Once you see the ‘Flash Complete!‘ message, you can exit balenaEtcher or start flashing another USB flash drive.