Cannot flash a 16GB image to a 16GB CF card

balenaEtcher
1

I have a 16GB .xz image that I’d like to flash onto a 16GB CF card, however, Etcher (newest version 1.5.115) tells me the CF card is “too small”. Is there a workaround for this? I’m using Etcher on MacOS 10.15.7.

Thank you!
Daniel

4

Hi Daniel,

Unfortunately, the image is likely too large to write to that card. Do you have another card you can try?

Also, what kind of image is it? It’s possible you could shrink it if it’s a disk image with some free space.

5

Thank you for the response. The image is a 16GB image and I have a 16GB card. The image was actually made by someone using the same SanDisk CF card I have. Ether sees the card as too small, regardless. I was able to write the image to a 32GB card and it works fine, but I’m just wasting 16GB now.

The image is an Amiga file system image - so not something particularly common and it doesn’t use a FAT or HFS filesystem.

I’ll just settle for writing to the 32GB card for now. Thank you for your help.

Daniel

6

No problem. You may also be able to shrink the image slightly with a program like gparted. This is actually a pretty common issue when taking a block level image of a disk and attempting to write it directly to another disk with the same rated capacity. Often the usable capacity is slightly different between disks, and the image can’t be written without shrinking it some.

7

Also be advised that if you decide to shrink this image, data loss is a possibility, so you might want to work with a copy of the original.