Error flashing image using balenaEtcher on Windows 10

abhishek · December 13, 2019, 10:08pm

Hello balena community,

I’m trying to flash a custom Raspbian Buster image using Etcher on Windows 10 but I’m running into errors. The image has been compressed in .gz format (which means I can directly use the compressed file with Etcher). I have had no issues flashing the image on Ubuntu 18.04 and macOS using Etcher so I’m a bit confused at this point. This is the error I get mid-way through the flashing process:

"Something went wrong. If it is a compressed image, please check that the archive is not corrupted."

Here’s the error log:

Is there any solution or workaround for this issue?

Best regards,
Abhishek

thgreasi · December 13, 2019, 11:33pm

Hi Abhishek,
Can you clarify the version of balenaEtcher that you are using?

abhishek · December 14, 2019, 6:12pm

Hi @thgreasi,

The above error log is from version 1.5.69. Today morning I tested with version 1.5.70 but still faced the same issue.

abhishek · December 19, 2019, 2:45pm

Hi @thgreasi,

Just following up. Did you get a chance to look into this issue?

Regards,
Abhishek

nazrhom · December 19, 2019, 3:23pm

Hey @abhishek sorry for the delay, but unfortunately we haven’t been able to make progress on this yet. We asked the maintainer of balenaEtcher to look into this as soon as they have time, we will keep you updated in this thread.

abhishek · December 20, 2019, 9:51am

@nazrhom - Thanks for the update.

shaunmulligan · December 20, 2019, 9:58am

Hi one thing that might be worth testing to narrow down the area of code affected, would be to test if other .gz OS images fail to flash. Similarly if you could test a .zip version that would be of interest.

shaunmulligan · December 20, 2019, 10:03am

It would also be super useful if we can verify the integrity of the .gz by running a test using 7-zip as detailed here: https://superuser.com/questions/193290/testing-archive-with-7-zip

RDown1 · November 7, 2020, 7:03pm

I’m getting the exact same error message on Windows 10 trying to flash SD card. Have tried multiple times with same message occurring.

shawaj · November 24, 2020, 6:14pm

@RDown1 what version of Etcher are you using? Could you try downloading the latest v1.5.111

Also, have you tried running it as administrator?

marcus · November 25, 2020, 4:58am

Hi - I have the same issue using an old version and the new 1.5.111- I surface scanned my SD card to make sure the SD cards are ok and they are all working. I then did an SHA256 on the file I downloaded and got the correct sha (so no download errors), I tried this compressed file and it failed. Then I uncompressed the file to an .img image and it failed, same message every time - Something went wrong, if it is a compressed image check archive is not corrupted. The writer process ended unexpectedly.

gelbal · November 25, 2020, 2:22pm

Hi @marcus, welcome to the balena forums!

First of all, are you running Etcher as administrator?

Next, can you please provide more information on your setup?
We usually ask for the following as they help us troubleshoot the issue:

Etcher version:
Operating system and architecture:
Image flashed:
Do you see any meaningful error information in the DevTools?

(You can open DevTools by pressing Ctrl+Shift+I (Ctrl+Alt+I for Etcher before v1.3.x), or Cmd+Opt+I if you’re on macOS.)

It’d be good to know if you see the same errors in the DevTools on the different Etcher versions you mentioned.

I see couple of open issues with similar error on Etcher’s repository. Collecting more information helps us to see if there is a common pattern here.