balenaEtcher keeps ruining USB drives

Product support
24

Happened to me too, pretty frustrating

have PNY and ONN drives

26

I was able to recover both of my drives using the program initdisk

31

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.