EDITED: WHAT HAVE YOU DONE BALENA?

EDITED · December 22, 2019, 10:11am

your etcher software permanently damaged my 128gb sd card and suspiciously asked me for my password in a very un-uniform dialog, my sd card no longer works and only detects as a 200mb drive
your software is a virus and i will be resetting my entire computer now because of your software.

Jassky · December 22, 2019, 10:59am

Etcher is essentially an interface for the unix dd command. Etcher basically just executes dd if = YourImage.img of = /dev/deviceName which copies YourImage.img to the /dev/deviceName.

The dd command requires superuser or root privileges which is why it’s asking for your password. Asking for your password is 100% normal and expected behavior.

It’s likely that an error occurred during the copy that corrupted the partition table of the SD card. This can happen sometimes and has nothing to do with Etcher specifically since it is basically just using your systems dd command.

If this is the case, the corruption is not permanent damage and is easily fixable. I suggest you look on google for “Fix SD card partition” and follow instructions based on which operating system you’re using.

roman-mazur · December 23, 2019, 9:51am

As Jeff pointed out, Etcher needs elevated privileges to actually write the image to the disk. Etcher elevates its permissions for that particular operation. It’s definitely not a virus, and its source code is open source, so you can verify what it uses sudo permissions for.

If the disk got corrupted it can be possible to recover it with reformatting. We collected a couple of suggestions how to do it here:

github.com

balena-io/etcher/blob/master/docs/USER-DOCUMENTATION.md#recovering-broken-drives

Etcher User Documentation
=========================

This document contains how-tos and FAQs oriented to Etcher users.

Why is my drive not bootable?
-----------------------------

Etcher copies images to drives byte by byte, without doing any transformation
to the final device, which means images that require special treatment to be
made bootable, like Windows images, will not work out of the box. In these
cases, the general advice is to use software specific to those kind of
images, usually available from the image publishers themselves.

Images known to require special treatment:

- Microsoft Windows (use [Windows USB/DVD Download Tool][windows-usb-tool], 
  [Rufus][rufus], or [WoeUSB][woeusb]).

- Windows 10 IoT (use the [Windows 10 IoT Core Dashboard][windows-iot-dashboard])

This file has been truncated. show original

roman-mazur · December 23, 2019, 10:35am

Also, we don’t tolerate profanity on our forums which is thy the original post title and username are edited to remove offensive language.

g_vincent_guttmann · June 23, 2020, 7:31am

As the other said, etcher writes to your card. And possibly splits it up into more partitions. Your card is not broken, but just “soft-bricked”. If you are not able to reformat it using basic formatting in file explorer, try the “SD Card Formatter” by the SD Card association. Also I feel you, but if you expect help, please stay on topic. If you just want to ramble and don’t get any help: Fine, go ahead and continue writing like this.

But if you wanr or need help, stay on topic, describe your problem and list things you’ve already tried.

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EDITED: WHAT HAVE YOU DONE BALENA?

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