I know I’m not the only person to experience this, as evidenced here: balenaEtcher keeps ruining USB drives
And here: BalenaEtcher destroyed 3 new USB drives - #9 by zwhitchcox
And here: BalenaEtcher ruining my flash drives - Troubleshooting - Linus Tech Tips
Yeah I know, “Balena Etcher can’t ruin a flash drive”.
Well that’s not what I mean. What I mean is, it is leaving them in a state that is causing all sorts of errors and freezing just plugging them into my PC. Not to mention that it did this to multiple drives after “Flash Failed” on both of them for Zorin OS.
Now, attempting to do anything with these drives in Windows fails, resulting in them becoming “RAW” drives. I am unable to delete partitions or format, using DISKPART, Partition Manager, or Paragon. All errors.
Balena Etcher is doing something to the filesystem partition table and messing with the partition table in a really bad way.