Using Monterey formatting drive FAT32 and using BalenaEtcher latest version drive too small. I am wondering if the mac is placing hidden files on the drive?
Hi there! Etcher will re-format the USB drive being written to so it shouldn’t matter what filesystem is in place ahead of time or if the host OS places any hidden files. Can you confirm that the image you’re flashing does in fact fit on a 32GB drive? Note that firmware images are often distributed compressed & tend to require more storage space on a target drive than you might expect.
It would also be worth running some diagnostics on your USB flash drive to make sure it’s in working order and is fully writable. I’m afraid I’m not a Mac user so I’m not familiar with what tools are natively available that you can use to test the drive with.