Find out why balenaEtcher failed creating a bootable USB | by Aleksandar Jovanović | Jan, 2022 | Medium

It all started when my Raspberry Pi stopped responding and then it didn’t let me to connect to it by SSH(I run it headless). Restarting didn’t help, so finally I connected it to a monitor to see what’s going on, and there I got the dreadful: Cannot boot because: Kernel panic — not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

Since I don’t have a dedicated PC running Linux, I thought creating a bootable USB running Rescatux will be enough to get me started in solving this. Ok, run balenaEtcher, create a bootable USB and I’ll be on my way.

It all looked normal, flashing was fast.

Validation was even faster. But then…

Surprise...

But why??? Okay, maybe it was a glitch. So I did it all again.
Again the same. So I checked the flash drive and it was completely fine.
Maybe the image is corrupted? Nope, sha1 checksum matches.

So why does it validate to 100% and then fail? Furthermore it doesn’t show any information about what kind of problem caused the failure.

I started Googling it, how do I get some information on why it failed. Fortunately this fellow revealed how to get some more information from balenaEtcher.

So this is what you need to do, press Ctrl+Shift+I and you will get a new window, called Developer Tools. There go to the Console tab, scroll to the bottom and look for text “Flash results”, click the “▶ Object” and it will show more information, then “▶ results” and finally “▶ errors”. There you will find information on what actually went wrong.

I was lucky, an error that means nothing is really broken.

In the situation above, we got an error because OS tried to unmount the drive but failed to do so. The flashing was a success after all 😀

I hope the kind of error you are experiencing is similarly simple to deal with.