Please use the thread below to discuss the related blog post: [image] Etcher killed my USB stick … or did it? SD cards go through a lot of hard work and sometimes they fail. Learn how to recover a broken USB drive or SD Card that doesn’t seem to work.

bookmarked this so whenever I get a broken usb I fix it this way lol

It Worked but my USB stick is not showing the space it can support and i can’t acces it

Yes it broke my USB Stick… not one but 2 SanDisk 16GB which I’ve used on many projects over the years Tried all the possible fixes in this thread but with no success. I feel that Balena are in denial… there is obviously a problem but they don’t wish to address it. I’m happy to do another one vis T…

It looks like I managed to recover my USB hard drive by using Rufus instead of Etcher. It looks like the ubuntu 22.04 ISO I was using (standard from Ubuntu’s site - nothing fishy, as far as I know), is a hybrid image. If I had to guess, Etcher isn’t accounting for hybrid ISO files potentially causin…

yeah killed (so it seems) two usb drives as well … flashed nobara on the first and when the installation failed i tried my second sandisk 32gb stick which didn’t work either. completely unable to restore them to normal functionality now. i get the same error massage as was reported by swifter above.…

BalenaEtcher killed my MicroSD card. I know you can hide behind the ToS, but please consider removing the SD card flashing capability on your software until you figure out a way to make sure you won’t kill some SD cards. Luckily my SD card is still in warranty, otherwise I would’ve been SOL. #Balena…

Hello friends, I have this damn problem after using this BalenaEtcher on my HP x750w 32GB pendrive, I used it and I have the following problems: Device media is write-protected I’ve done all the procedures in this topic and it didn’t solve it! Diskpart the following error occurs: DISKPART> attr…

Here also to say that my 128 GB brand new flash disc has been broken by this particular sw. Access denied same as [Yakbutter] or [Curlymike]. They are in denial. Ggs

Thank you garid101, much love. I truly love you. This tool saved my usb. LOVE YOU

Etcher broke my USB stick … or did it?

Discussions

garid101 November 2, 2022, 4:44pm 61

Guys use rufus to format ur disk with below option. It worked for my 2 broken drive by balena.

Topic		Replies	Views
BalenaEtcher destroyed 3 new USB drives balenaEtcher support	32	10502	May 11, 2026
Etcher killed my USB stick balenaEtcher	89	86329	December 13, 2023
balenaEtcher keeps ruining USB drives Product support	35	9124	January 23, 2026
I used balenaetcher.io desktop program to flash my usb and it destroyed my usb balenaEtcher	28	6388	March 12, 2023
Etcher has bricked 4 USB Sticks and 3 SD Cards balenaEtcher	12	4801	February 14, 2025

Etcher broke my USB stick … or did it?

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