After Flashing OS images to USB drives, the other partition are not readable anymore

balenaEtcher
1

Hi,
I wanted to create a Bootable USB stick for Ubuntu. For that, I took an USB stick with some data on it and ran balenaEtcher (1.13.1) on OSX (Ventura 13.1).
The flashing itself went fien, but the USB stick wasn’t recognized anymore by OSX and I can’t access anymore the data on the other partition:

Here is what I get via diskutility:
/dev/disk2 (external, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *124.2 GB disk2
1: Microsoft Basic Data 4.1 GB disk2s1
2: EFI ESP 4.4 MB disk2s2
3: Microsoft Basic Data 307.2 KB disk2s3
4: Linux Filesystem 120.1 GB disk2s4

But I can’t mount disk2s4 and this is where I have a lot of data that I need (lot of pictures).

diskutil mount readOnly /dev/disk2s4

Volume on disk2s4 failed to mount
If you think the volume is supported but damaged, try the “readOnly” option

How can I access that partition?

2

Hi @vdarmsta,

Flashing a USB stick does erase all its content and replace it with the image you are flashing. It wipes the entire partition table, so the data on the stick are probably not recoverable.

Concerning accessing the Ubuntu data from your MacOS, Linux file system (often ext4 or btrfs) are not natively supported by MacOS so it is normal you can’t read the data from your Mac. You should still be able to boot from it anyway, and then access it from within Linux.

The best way to transfer data between Mac and Linux is to have a VFAT or exFAT formated partition to put the shared data to.
Otherwise, if you are at ease with this, you can install a linux distribution in a virtualmachine on your mac. This will be able to access the Linux file system and then extract the data to a shared folder between your Host OS (MacOS) and the Guest Os (Linux).

I hope this helps.

4

Thanks for your answer.
I was naive and didn’t realize flashing a USB stick was meaning erasing all its content. I really thought it was creating a partition and I could kept all my data.
But, I have been able to recover it with Disk Drill, so at the end, this is ok.
Thanks.