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Cover image for Getting balenaEtcher to Work on macOS Catalina
H. Kamran
H. Kamran

Posted on • Originally published at hkamran.com on

Getting balenaEtcher to Work on macOS Catalina

I just recently upgraded to macOS Catalina, and needed to flash a microSD card for my Raspberry Pi. However, balenaEtcher was throwing an error when trying to flash the image.

After a little while, I realized that Catalina included some extra privacy protections. I went into System Preferences and turned on โ€œFull Disk Accessโ€ for balenaEtcher. But lo and behold, the error still persisted.

The Solution

After doing a bit of research, I found that balenaEtcher, and Etcher (the former name of balenaEtcher), had a command-line utility to launch the app.

sudo /Applications/balenaEtcher.app/Contents/MacOS/balenaEtcher

The command booted up a graphical interface of balenaEtcher, the difference that, because of the โ€œsudoโ€ in the command, it ran under the root user. This bypassed the security/privacy restrictions placed (wisely) by Apple on Catalina.

Image: balenaEtcher after being opened with sudo from the command-line

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