I had this same issue today, it was a right pain.
Lenovo M75n IoT with M.2 SSD, installing HAOS.
Used a live Linux bootable USB (Ubuntu Desktop). Managed to install Balena Etcher easily enough, and download the image, but Balena Etcher failed to even start writing to the SSD.
Moved over to a Linux Mint bootable USB, and installed Balena Etcher, and it installed to 32% before the whole machine locked up. I left it for an hour or so, but it didn’t recover. However, when I rebooted, HA appeared to boot absolutely fine. Spent the next couple of hours playing around, before realising I had networking issues with anything external (logs showed issues with the weather integration, and I couldn’t migrate to MariaDB because the mirrors weren’t accessible). Everything pointed to DNS issues, but even manually setting the DNS server didn’t help. So, whilst I had assumed the image restore completed and maybe the graphics had just locked up, it definitely had not completed.
Tried various other methods, including an external USB caddy, but it wasn’t compatible. Also tried other disk imaging software, but none of them would detect the in-built SSD, they only worked for USB devices, and I didn’t have a suitable enclosure.
In the end, this guide did the trick. Used Ubuntu Desktop live again (as I had before), but installed Balena Etcher a different way, using an older version as per this guide. It threw a number of errors when installing Balena Etcher, but it did install and ran fine. It failed when using the URL, but downloading the image and selecting the file worked perfectly, got to 100% and successfully verified the write.