Howto: Install balenaEtcher on Arch Linux for Flashing OS Images to USB Drives

A very common task in the Linux world is flashing USB drives with an OS image, required for installation or repair, or a self-contained toolkit useful for system maintenance or recovery.

The tool I recommend for this is balenaEtcher.

In order to install balenaEtcher you will use the following command.

$ yay -S balena-etcher

After installing it, you can open it up and it will look as follows.

Choose your image to be flashed and select the target disk to flash the image to. Remember, the target disk will be completely erased before being flashed!

Here are some example files to flash:

• Arch Linux: Arch Linux is my OS of choice, a minimal and simple distribution with rolling updates and an excellent package manager.
• Rescatux: Rescatux is a Debian-based live distribution featuring a graphical wizard for rescuing broken GNU/Linux and Windows installations and boot loaders.
• Super Grub2: Super GRUB2 Disk helps you to boot into most any operating system even if you cannot boot into it by normal means.
• Clonezilla: Clonezilla is a partition and disk imaging/cloning program. It helps you to do system deployment, bare metal backup and recovery.
• Boot Repair Disk: Boot Repair Disk is a tool that automatically solves the majority of bootsector/GRUB/MBR problems.
• GParted: GParted is a free partition manager that enables you to resize, copy, and move partitions without data loss.