Etcher claims the freshly formatted target drive is the source drive and wont let me select it

[alinanorakari]

• Etcher version: 1.18.4
• Operating system and architecture: macOS Ventura 13.3.1 on Intel iMac Pro
• Image flashed: self-built installation ISO for NixOS
• What do you think should have happened: I should have been able to select the thumb drive as my target drive to flash the ISO
• What happened: Etcher shows a blue "Source drive" label next to the thumb drive and disabled the check box to select it as the target
• Do you see any meaningful error information in the DevTools? no

The target selection dialog:

The location of the image:

Unusual things about the system:

• The boot drive is not the internal drive but an SSD connected via USB because the internal drive is flaky. The boot drive is disk6 according to Disk Utility
  • disk7 is the APFS container
  • disk7s1s1 is the macOS volume
    • This is where the ISO resides that I want to flash
• The internal drive that is not used for booting is disk0 ⚠️ Etcher misidentified this drive as the System drive
• The thumb drive got assigned disk2
  • There are no files on the thumb drive, it has just been formated and is empty

[lurch]

Related to #3591 & #3734 ?

[aethernet]

Looks like the same bug indeed.

[that-ben]

A year later, this still happens on the most stable build. Any progress on this?

[aethernet]

Haven't been able to repro yet, so no progress

[sarfatis]

Situation: Etcher 1.18.4 with debian12 on external USB APFS targeting reformatted USB shown uncheckable as source. Interpretation: There seems to be a confusion between source-usb and target-usb in Etcher preventing flashing. Workaround : Copy source original-file from external source drive to internal system drive copy-file. Usage: Quit and relaunch Etcher using copy-file from system drive as source : No more uncheckable confusion.

[that-ben]

Honestly, this is quite a pain to do that every time, especially when your system volume is small. I feel like Balena Etcher doesn't care about its macOS user base, which is quite sad. Anyway, I just took a habit of launching Terminal and executing this and it works for me: sudo dd if=/dev/souce of=/dev/target

Good luck everyone.

[aethernet]

Honestly, this is quite a pain to do that every time, especially when your system volume is small. I feel like Balena Etcher doesn't care about its macOS user base, which is quite sad. Anyway, I just took a habit of launching Terminal and executing this and it works for me: sudo dd if=/dev/souce of=/dev/target

Good luck everyone.

All the current maintainers are mac users :) So trust me when I say we do care about mac ...

The problem here is that we have no repro...

[6R1MR34P3R]

Happening the same on last update MacOS 15 Sequoia

[aravikusu]

Was encountering this issue as well. I'm unsure if this will help any, but I was plugging my USB into a hub. When I tried plugging it into the machine directly it no longer incorrectly said that my USB was my "source drive", and let me select it.

[oivinde]

Was encountering this issue as well. I'm unsure if this will help any, but I was plugging my USB into a hub. When I tried plugging it into the machine directly it no longer incorrectly said that my USB was my "source drive", and let me select it.

I have a Mac Mini M2 with a docking base. Experience the same issue and solution. Plugged into dock, USB identifies as source, directly in Mac Mini, no problem. Drive is 64GB USB 3 SanDisk.