Etcher broke my USB stick … or did it?

Discussions
42

Hi everyone,

There is something really strange with Etcher. Indeed, two of my USB stick were down after using it. I use Etcher on Mac OS Catalina to create a install media of the OS. This work just fine. I was able to install Mac OS Catalina. But after, when I need to format de USB and use it for something else, here is were issues starts. USB seems clearly to be unfunctionnal.

On Mac OS, I can see the install media created. But when I try with disk utility to do stuff, it is not possible. If I try the command mentionned here, not working. It is the same for Linux. I can see the install media created but I can’t do anything on it, even with the terminal.

On Windows, the disk is restricted, I don’t have the write permission to do what I want. I have use cmd and also diskpart with chmod, clear attributes, etc… even regedit. But no way to use the usb again. With AOMEI, I can erase the disk but that all. All the rest is not available because of the fact that disk is not mounted or sometime dynamic. It seems to have no partition et no volume on the USB. The format is stil GPT.

I am stuck between “You don’t have to permission to write” and “Error E/S”.

@dtischler Could you please provide me some help as the last USB key was working just perfectly and now its dead…

Thanks a lot

44

Hi @R41L, sorry for the delay here. First question to confirm, is that the image you flashed to the USB stick was a Mac OS Catalina .iso or .img file? Was that Apple’s official installation media file, or, you generated your own? (Is that an option somewhere in a running Mac OS, perhaps??)

Next, on Windows machine when attempting to clear the USB stick, are you running CMD and DiskPart as an Administrator? If not, local account permissions might not be enough. Similarly on Linux, if you are using utilities there, try running them as root. Let’s see if that helps, to start.

45

I would like to add that every single time I have used Balena Etcher it has made my USB totally unusable/unrecoverable. I thought it was a problem with the specific distro, but no: It does this every. single. time. it is used.

1 Like
46

Well, I’ve tried everything in the post, and the comments below, and these two drives are still bricked ie write protected.

As to your assertion that your software does nothing that could possibly do this is obviously simply not true. Looking on the SanDisk website, it seems this write protection mechanism is something that is built into the firmware of these drives to protect data when the drive’s firmware controller thinks it has detected data corruption.

So your claim that it was not your software that causes the drive to brick itself is nothing but a lame word -play ie - a lie - that I could perhaps best illustrate with a physical analogy.

Say there is someone sitting right on the edge of the roof of a high rise building, and you are walking along, near them, and behind them.

You give them a push, gentle, but enough to move them a couple of inches, enough to push them off the ledge, which leads to their death, caused by the long fall to the ground. Your defense is that you did not kill them, your push was gentle and only moved them a couple of inches.

There should be a large clear warning on your software and your website warning people using SanDisk drives NOT to use your software, as it is clearly capably of easily incorrectly triggering the failsafe locking feature built into this particular hardware……

Thanks for nothing, guys.

PS I agree with the previous poster - EVERY SINGLE TIME I used Etcher, it bricked my drive. I spent a lot of time trying to recover the first one it bricked, so I thought that perhaps it was the drive, so I used ANOTHER brand new drive (of the same kind Sandisk) with the software (the first one Etcher destroyed was a new drive also.). It gave me the exact same error after the formatting process, and bricked that drive unrecoverably also.

WARNING TO EVERYBODY. DO NOT USE THIS SOFTWARE WITH NEW SANDISK DRIVES!

48

Hello @pixelwash

I’ve been a heavy user of etcher for years with many different sticks and sd cards and never “bricked” any.

As this thread seems to prove, there’s definitely a combination of drives, adaptors and images that causes a device to look bricked when flashed with etcher.

Can you tell us more about the combination you tried ?

What David meant when it says it cannot brick your device, is that etcher is simply copying byte per byte the data from the image to the disk. It’s not doing anything funky with those data, nor the disk.

To continue your analogy, it’s more like if etcher had walked behind the guy and say hello like a polite person. Then the guy fall.

As I’m not been able to replicate the issue yet, It’s hard to dig into it, so the more info you have the better. I’d like to find a way to add safeguard or auto-repair if it’s possible.

49

@Balena team:

Just a thought: If you cannot replicate the issue, maybe you could try the following:

  1. Ask people if anyone might be willing to replicate this on their machine with you joining them via teamviewer or sth similar

  2. Provide a postal address (maybe only to some selected users) where people can physically send their bricked sticks, so you can investigate

Cheers
Ph.

50

Replying here as well. (Created an account just for this)

This is the 3rd time i have run into this issue - Balena breaks USB-sticks, and the only way to recover it (Have tried for days using other methods) is to simply use the competitor Rufus.
Rufus always works, unfortunatley.
Might wanna add that at the top for people.

Untill this issue is fixed Balenas is simply not an option - And if its not possible to recreate i would love to help, but at the same time it happens so often it should be really simple to reproduce

51

@frustrated (and anyone else) feel free to ship any broken USB sticks to one of the balena office addresses with a note explaining what happened and we may be able to do a live YouTube stream to investigate or something! The addresses are here: balena - Contact

@BrokenStick it’s a bit confusing to say the stick is broken but then it works again if you flash it with some other software - doesn’t that mean it’s not broken?

Also for anyone else: please share what image you’re trying to flash when encountering this scenario and we may be able to take a look at it.

52

Hi all!

I’m new to the PI, new to Etcher, but not so new to IT. I had an old PI I decided to try to get in working shape, and in short order was directed to the Etcher program.

Following directions, it worked exactly as advertised. Except during the Etcher verification phase, Windows started throwing alerts about the drive being unusable and needing to be formatted. Then another message from Windows referencing another partition (drive letter) needing to be formatted. I ignored and pressed on, and used the drive to image the PI. Well this one didn’t work (couldn’t boot the PI). Thinking it may be a bad USB drive, I decided to try again with a different drive / model.

During the 2nd “Etching” I encountered the same messages from Windows during the verification phase. However this time the procedure worked, and I have a working PI.

Now I have 2 USB drives that are unreadable from my Windows or LX systems. I Googled “Etcher broke my USB” - and here we are! I followed the procedure to recover the drive (on my 1st “broken” USB drive), and it worked exactly as stated. Thank you Balena for that!! But one thing I’d like to point out. The article indicates this is probably an issue with the drive. I don’t believe that for a second. One of the drives I used was brand new. In both instances I encountered the same behavior (a 2nd partition was created, and the drive no longer available to the OS). I believe something in the Etcher process is rendering the drives unusable to anything other than the PI / device recovery. My recommendation is for this to be pointed out up front, along with a link to this recovery article.

Once again Thank You for the product!

-bk

53

Same here, wrote the image for XCP-ng 8.2.1 on a 32GB stick. Could not re-format that stick afterwards (no, diskpart clean did not help, convert gpt as well). Re-wrote the same image using rufus and was just able to clean the stick and create a fresh partition with diskpart, including format. Not sure what etcher does to these drives, just happy I got it working again.

54

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

55

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

56

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 TeamViewer to PROVE there is an issue but I don’t think, after reading the thread, they are particularly interested.

58

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 causing access problems.

ISO_vs_DD
ISO_vs_DD582×666 21.6 KB

1 Like
59

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. tried running powershell admin as suggested but to no avail. this really made me doubt I’m ever gonna throw another drive at your savage software. sad.

usb medium dead
usb medium dead837×656 23.9 KB

61

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

image
image466×540 12.6 KB

1 Like
62

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. #BalenaEtcherKilledMySDCard

63

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> attributes disk clear readonly

Disk attributes cleared successfully.

DISKPART> CLEAN

DiskPart has encountered an error: The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error.
See the System Event Log for more information.

By RUFUS the same error occurred:

Error: [0xC003045D] The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error.

I tried peo GPARTED and found the same problem to do the recording.

I don’t have money to buy another Pendrive, and now how to make Balena? Will I be compensated for the damage?

I humbly await your help.

64

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

65

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