PVE images seem not bootable but, in fact, are

Current versions of Etcher confront me with “It looks like this is not a bootable image” when I try to flash an ISO image of the current Proxmox VE 5.4 onto USB even though, in fact, it gives a bootable USB drive.

I checked with Windows 10 1809 (OS Build 17763.1) x64 and Etcher versions

• 1.5.24 Error
• 1.5.17 Error
• 1.5.5 Error
• 1.5.0 Error
• 1.4.9 NO error

and on PVE 5.4 x64 with Etcher versions

• 1.5.24 Error
• 1.5.0 Etcher crashing due to some other error about images
• 1.4.9 NO error

Version 1.5.0 apparently introduced some change that gives this message for PVE ISO files.

Etcher’s documentation explains

Etcher copies images to drives byte by byte, without doing any transformation to the final device, which means images that require special treatment to be made bootable, like Windows images, will not work out of the box.

Copying byte by byte is exactly what is requried for PVE ISO files. This can be seen as using dd and avoiding Rufus is suggested in the PVE Wiki and even clearer as the USB drive is working in the end.

[zvin]

The issue comes from node-gpt that can’t parse the partition table of this disk image. It errors with Error: Invalid signature: Expected "EFI PART", saw "PM". I’ll have a look.

[dominicjaeger]

Thank you for solving this!