I downloaded "raspbian stretch with desktop" .img file from the official raspbery pi website (kernel version 4.14), changed it to a .bin file so the recovery utility would recognize it, and mounted it onto an sd card with chromebook recovery utility using the following instructions:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/278403/how-do-you-make-usb-bootable-on-chromebook
The sd card meets the minimum requirements to mount and boot raspbian per raspberry pi documentation. When I attempt to boot raspbian on my pi3 I get the following error:
end Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(179,2)
I have found solutions to this problem for NOOBS that involves editing the cmdline.txt file but not the full rasbian version I mounted. Holding shift as raspbian boots does nothing so I cannot edit relevant files from there. Also, Chromeos does not let me edit text files within the boot directory on the mounted os.