balenaEtcher v1.7.7 on Windows 11 desktop
Tried flashing Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS onto an old 16GB flash drive (PNY). “Flash failed!” Took it out, put it in a different port. The bar was full and the size was messed up. Everything that was on it before was gone too. Figured I mischecked how much storage it had left or it was just old, so I didn’t try much else and got a new one (NXT 32GB 2.0).
Tried again with the brand new USB. Flash failed again. Drive disappeared from file explorer, but showed up in disk management. Couldn’t figure it out, gave up. Left the USB in the port. A couple weeks go by, I look into it again. I don’t remember what all I tried but eventually I was able to successfully run clean.
Tried flashing Ubuntu a third time with the latter. SAME THING. Made sure to run etcher as admin; etcher finished validating and then said flash failed; flash drive disappeared from file explorer. But it shows up in diskmgmt as Disk 1—no partitions or volume, just blank grey. In diskpart list disk its status is No Media, with 0 B size and 0 B free.
The computer went to sleep or whatever and when I came back earlier to post this, the flash drive was back in file explorer (red, full bar, says 14.0 KB free of 3.88 MB). It has 3 EFI files. diskmgmt and list disk changed too. In case that’s relevant, idk. This is how they are at the moment:
So, what do I do about the flash drive ? And why does etcher keep failing? What am I doing wrong? What do I need to do for this to go smoothly and properly in the future??