Etcher: Warn about images without a partition table

[waspinator]

1.0.0-beta. 10
OSX 10.11(.0)

ESXi ISO image does not boot after flashed to USB
VMware-VMvisor-Installer-6.0.0.update02-3620759.x86_64.iso

The flashing processes seems to go okay, no errors reported in the dev tools or otherwise.

Image is avaialble for free, but with registration at vmware.com

Drive was formatted to FAT32

LinuxLive USB creates a bootable and working drive.

I noticed that when plugged into a PC, the USB drive created with etcher is not recognized (asks to be formatted), while the one created with LinuxLive looks like a regular usb drive with files on it.

[jviotti]

Hi @waspinator ,

Thanks for reporting. I'll give the image a spin myself and will report back how it goes!

[jviotti]

This VMWare image is very weird. It doesn't contain a partition table at all, which is the reason you can't open it in Windows (its simply a raw partition).

I can confirm Etcher is flashing the image the correct way, however the image seems to need special treatment to be made bootable (it doesn't work with dd neither). LinuxLive USB simply puts the *.iso as it is in the drive, and writes a special configuration file to boot to it, while UNetBootin for example, writes a GRUB to the drive, creating an entry that points to the partition.

I'm not sure what do to about this. The image works in other Linux specific writing tools since well, they are intended to write Linux images only, and therefore can make some assumptions, and do some extra stuff around that.

We could add support for these stuff on Etcher, but it might conflict with non-Linux images, so I guess it would come as an opt-in feature.

The real fix would be for VMWare to produce real bootable images that don't need any special treatment.

[waspinator]

I doubt VMware would be interested in changing their ISO build process, but I guess it can't hurt to try and contact them.

If writing linux specific ISOs is not in etcher's mandate, then perhaps it can produce an error when someone tries to use an incompatible image. Maybe even suggest LinuxLive or unetbootin as an alternative when displaying the error.

[jviotti]

I'd love to keep this issue in the backlog in order to think more about
it. I'm all for it if we find a way to introduce it a safe way.

What we can do for now is detect if the image you select contains a
partition table, and if not, present a warning message along the
following lines:

WARNING: The image you selected doesn't appear to be valid (doesn't
have a valid partition table).
Please make sure that you're image is not corrupted, or check with the
provider in case this image require special treatment to be made
bootable, or requires special tooling to be flashed.

What do you think? /cc @taahirisaacs

On Mon, Jul 04, 2016 at 10:43:05AM -0700, waspinator wrote:

I doubt VMware would be interested in changing their ISO build process, but I guess it can't hurt to try and contact them.

If writing linux specific ISOs is not in etcher's mandate, then perhaps it can produce an error when someone tries to use an incompatible image. Maybe even suggest LinuxLive or unetbootin as an alternative when displaying the error.

---

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Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
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Juan Cruz Viotti
Software Engineer, Resin.io

[taahirisaacs]

@jviotti SGTM, I think a subtle warning alert should do the trick here

[jviotti]

@taahirisaacs Do you think we can re-use/extend the orange warning ribbon that was implemented here: https://github.com/resin-io/etcher/issues/45#issuecomment-204415471?

[taahirisaacs]

@jviotti I was thinking along those exact lines

[jviotti]

@taahirisaacs We should still allow some way for the user to ignore the warning and proceed.

[lurch]

We should still allow some way for the user to ignore the warning and proceed.

Yeah. I recall back in the days of the early LiveUSB Linux distros (DamnSmallLinux etc.) there were some distros that used "hard drive" formatting (i.e. with a traditional MBR at the start of the disk) and some that used "superfloppy" formatting (i.e. just the raw partition written to the disk, with no MBR). I think at the time, that some BIOSes could only boot one or the other.

[jviotti]

I'm closing this issue in favour of https://github.com/resin-io/etcher/issues/1189, which is concerned with detecting partition tables on drives.

[lurch]

A user on Gitter reports that VMware esxi 6.5 has the same "problem".

[brettveenstra]

still an issue with VMware vSphere Hypervisor 6.5.0a ISO, even after #1189 & #1248 work - any other update planned to support these media types?

[jhermsmeier]

@brettveenstra can you elaborate a bit on what exactly the issue is you're experiencing, and what the expected behavior would be?

[gbdavidx]

can't boot either, same error as above on dell r510 server

[Mac-On]

Hi,

had the same problem today with the latest VMware-VMvisor-Installer-6.7.0-8169922.x86_64.iso (SHA256SUM=884ead30532f4a5c2152e4ac450839a0062aba3ae859b5fa5e233ce4275c8cb6).

Etcher and also dd can't create a bootable USB-Stick from the ISO file ("It looks like this is not a bootable image. The image does not appear to contain a partition table, and might not be recognized or bootable by your device." is the warning you will get in Etcher, no warning at all with dd) …

But there is a fast and easy solution: Use unetbootin from [https://unetbootin.github.io] – it works, also on macOS. :)

Tested & Confirmed, no problem to boot into ESXi 6.7 on my Mac.

[lurch]

I wonder if Etcher could do any special-detection of VMWare images, and then suggest an alternative flashing tool, just like the Windows-images special behaviour Etcher has?

[jhermsmeier]

I don't think we'd want to add exceptions for every vendor that doesn't ship hybrid ISOs. Windows is the exception, because it's very common for people to try. We might get to adding support ISO / UDF, and for sticking a bootloader in front of these some time in the future, but it's a whole lot of work, and not a priority at this time.

[Mac-On]

At all my different clients, VMware vSphere/ESXi is "the standard" in enterprise environments – so if you wanna use a commercial virtualisation solution, normally you will use VMware. Saying this, it's not only 'another vendor' but a solution, which is well known and rock solid. Too sad the developers of Etcher won't support it, so better use unetbootin, which works fine out of the box, as I've already mentioned above.

[doertedev]

https://github.com/balena-io/etcher/issues/553#issuecomment-386222985 << same problem with the UBCD and BOTH unetbootin and etcher from macos, with the exception that neither produce a bootable medium.

[lurch]

same problem with the UBCD

See also #2704