it says not enough space
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Hi there â thanks for trying that. Can you please try going through the âHow to Recover a USB Drive or SD Card Using Windowsâ section at https://www.balena.io/blog/did-etcher-break-my-usb-sd-card/? Please be sure to follow each step exactly as described.
All the best,
Hugh
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That latest screen cap makes me think the SD card is bad. Windows Disk Admin is usually pretty good about seeing the entire capacity of a device, even with strange partitions or corruption. And it rarely has an issue formatting unless the device has a problem.
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It was working fine until the balena format
Disk part didnât work either
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Hi Nikos
Did you go through the blog post that my colleague linked - https://www.balena.io/blog/did-etcher-break-my-usb-sd-card/ ?
Did you run into any issues trying the things listed there?
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Yes, I did, disk part couldnât create partition primary
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Hi Nikos
Have you tried using a different OS? Mac or Linux perhaps.
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i donât have any of those
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Nikos
Itâs impossible that Etcher could break your SD card. It is possible that your card was already worn due to many write cycles and it happened to go bad at this time, but Etcher isnât doing anything special which might cause this. I will explain a little about how the disk works with the OS and then we can get to a means of recovering it.
Your SD card is made up of a series of memory locations, with the first few bytes taken up with a partition table. This table stores information about how the rest of the memory locations are populated. For example, it might say that there is a 1GB partition starting at block X, and it is formatted with the FAT32 filesystem. Now, if you have a 128GB card, then it will still show a partition of 1GB and no more, due to this partition table.
When you wrote your Raspberry Pi image, it included a partition table along with the data for those partitions. Typically a linux OS will have multiple partitions for different uses, and they also use filesystems which Windows doesnât understand. When you put the card in your machine, it reads the partition table and then shows you the partitions that it can read. Right now, the partition table is either corrupted, or contains partitions which your Windows OS cannot read. To fix this, you need to wipe the partition table.
I have tested this by creating a 32mb empty image using the dd command, which you donât have in windows. I then used Etcher to write it to my SD card and Etcher correctly warns that it will overwrite my partition table. This is fine, I let it. After it finished, MacOS will ask if I want to initialise my card, since it has no partitions on it. Windows will likely do the same. I have attached the image if it helps.
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A file has been uploaded using Jellyfish: https://jel.ly.fish/9e3ae567-03ad-47e9-8806-4a3294cff6c0
⌠also looking at your above screenshots it would appear that your SD card really is ~32Mb â what brand is it, and when did you buy it?
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Adata brand, 4 gigabytes
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Can you clarify whether this was a brand new SD card or was this ever used before to hold a number of files, proving that it could indeed hold more than 32MB?
Did you Pi manage to boot the SD card after you flashed Pi OS (32-bit) Lite?
It might be a faulty SD card.
As a side note, we have also seen cases of SD cards faking their actual side and ending up in similar state once you try to store more than they can actually hold.
Kind regards,
Thodoris
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I used it before for mp3
It had of course more than 30mb
I didnât put it in pi
After balena, I wanted to write an ssh file in the micro sd and couldnât
Then i tried formatting it with windows and android phone
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Nikos, I donât want to keep you going in circles, but I just want to confirm the current status. I understand you followed the blog post ( https://www.balena.io/blog/did-etcher-break-my-usb-sd-card/), but you were not able to get past the step create partition primary? At that point, after the clean command, âthe drive is now blank, and can be re-flashed with Etcher.â Did you try flashing with Etcher after the clean step? If so, and you are still seeing only 32 Mb, perhaps the SD card may be faulty.
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I want to bump this post as after using balena etcher to flash rasbpian, my Sandisk ultra, class A1 32GB became an unformattable 30mb piece of junk.
I second every step and issues Nikos is having: Sd card formatter fails, diskpart cannot create partitions, every possible software I downloaded to investigate shows 30mb instead of 32Gb the card has. Or had, before using balena etcher. You guys need to fix this issue, or at least make it very clear that there is a solid chance that once youâve flashed the sd with balena, then itâs forever.
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Hey @ruspa, I replied to your similar post here: How to restore correct partition size after flashing with balena? - #3 . It is unlikely that this issue is caused by Etcher as we flash millions of cards per month without issues.
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Hey hereâs how I fix all of my disks on windows.
Open start menu select run
Inside the run box type diskpart
Once diskpart opens in the terminal type list disk
Type select disk x for whatever disk you want to fix
After you select the right disk type clean
Should fix it if windows canât see it run the list disk command again select the disk and type create partition primary. Good luck I made an account just to help
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Sd is in the trash bin log time ago already
Thanks anyway
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