Happened to me too, pretty frustrating
have PNY and ONN drives
1 Like
I was able to recover both of my drives using the program initdisk
After writing Ubuntu 24.04 ISO onto my USB drive using BalenaEtcher, Windows 10 was seeing the flash drive as 2 separate drives. Windows was unable to open either of those detected drives. Windows couldn’t even format the USB drive which I thought was now corrupted. Guess what? I opened that same USB drive on a Linux Mint machine. It was perfectly functional. I formatted the drive on Linux Mint --it was back to normal, and functioning perfectly on the Windows 10 machine with the drive’s original capacity.
1 Like
Hello I just wanna say you saved my USB drive with this.
Never aging am I using Balena
1 Like
Your software is absolute unfiltered GARBAGE. No matter how much SOY milk you drink, this will not fix it. No matter how “tech” youtubers promote you (like the joke of “linux expert” SomeOrdinaryGamers who PROMOTES your POS software or the Ad Channel ETA Prime) this does not change the fact. RUFUS and ONLY RUFUS.
Now go ahead and ban me, I could not give 2 cents about that.
1 Like
Figured I’d contribute to this, when I used balenaEtcher to write an OS to my USB, it didn’t ‘brick’ the USB technically, but it did functionally brick it. Didn’t show up in file explorer, showed up in CMD but was unable to be formatted per the instructions in the article that claims the software is totally incapable of wrongdoing. Same symptoms on another device too. For anyone in the future reading this, I fixed it by using Rufus to write the same OS to the USB that I tried to write using Etcher, where it worked totally fine afterward (contrar to what balenaEtcher would have you believe). This software is ass. 
2 Likes
One more drive bites the dust
I am glad that BE cannot destroy USB sticks. Perhaps someone can tell me why I had 2 working sticks an hour ago, use BE twice, now I have none. So many people recommend this program, Raspberry PI I am looking at you. There are several suggested remmedies in this topic, perhaps BE should test them and tell us what to do? Maybe they already have and it is posted somewhere.
1 Like
After using BE I had two USB sticks which neither Windows FE nor Linux could see. Rufus could see it and could write to it. The sticks were then OK to use, reformat or whatever.
I’m convinced balena is a ploy made by usb manufacturers to sell more usb sticks by killing’em
Balena Etcher made bricked my usb and after formatting the read speed is ok but the write speed is around 1MB/s or less. Pls tell if there is a way to restore the write speed.
Lost a 32Gb sandisk just right now. diskpard partition minitool, initdisk, … doesn’t work. now I lost my usb and my time to sign up here and write this!
hope it helps to futures
I created an account here just to add to this thread. I am using Etcher to flash a drive with proxmox ISO. I was able to do this the first time with no issue and installed proxmox on another machine. When inserting the drive back into the machine with Etcher installed it would not work, windows thinks the drive is 2 drives and says I need to format to use, but can not format them, write protected. This USB drive is OLD! I thought maybe it’s done, but I grabbed a new drive and the same thing happened. I then tried one more drive and the same issue. All drives are different sizes, file systems and brands. I even reinstalled Etcher and the issue persists.
I found the balena post about using diskpart and was able to recover the drives, but if I try to flash an ISO, they all fail the same way and become unusable. I re-downloaded the ISO, same issue… Uninstalled Etcher and re-downloaded and installed, same issue.
As this is easily repeatable, I urge a dev to reach out to me if you have questions or would like some data.
Good luck out there… Back to Rufus for now.
Also lost diskpart and diskmgmt access to a drive after making a Rocky Linux boot drive. It’s a pretty basic problem, creating MBR maps that can’t be read or modified nateively by Windows. Surprised this thread is still alive. Just put a warning on the windows version that says the drive won’t be readable without software that can change the boot record or delete the MBR partition. I used minitool partition wizard but anyone with a Mac should also be able to help by deleting the partition and creating a new exFAT drive.
The dev response is funny though, anthropologically speaking. Not sure if it’s gaslighting or not if it’s been two years. Seems philosophically anti-Windows, which is a choice too
After seeing this forum, I just made an account to say the same thing happened to me too. I’m trying to install Holo ISO (SteamOS/ArchLinux) to my laptop and used BelenaEtcher. Selected the iso and the ONN USB drive then clicked flash. The iso installed successfully and then I tried to boot from it, The only thing that would show up was a black GRUB boot screen. So I boot back into Windows and try to flash the iso again just to find out Belena Etcher put the USB into read-only mode. At first I thought the USB drive was acting up so I tried the other USB drive I had and the iso successfully installed then I try booting from it again and this time it worked, installed Holoiso on my laptop. Then when I plugged the usb into my desktop computer to format it Belena Etcher also put this USB Drive into read-only mode. Tried pretty much every Reddit post and YouTube video to get both of my usb drives out of read-only and nothing worked. Pretty pissed to see 2 perfectly good usb drives go in the trash because some lazy ass dev that is in denial and won’t fix an issue in the software that’s been a problem since 2022. If I was the owner of BalenaEtcher I would of fired that dev Immediately. Get this Dumbass off payrole