Etcher can burn a single image to multiple SD writers, but if a card fails it doesn't say which slot the card is in

balenaEtcher
1

Hi
I am using three Bytecc U3-450 4 SD card reader/writer with Etcher. I am using these to clone Raspian images. Etcher allows me to load all three SD card readers and write a single image to all of them. That’s great.
The problem is that if one SD card fails, Etcher doesn’t say which one. That is really bad. It means I know I have 11 good cards but 1 bad. How do I then identify the bad card???

I did some experimenting with inserting/removing cards and I can see that Etcher knows which slot has a card inserted. It almost certainly knows which slot has the failed SD card. This indicates no problem with drivers etc. It appears that the Etcher code simply doesn’t present this info to the GUI.

Knowing the drive letter does not help the user figure out which slot is occupied and/or which slot has a faulty card.

It is proposed that Etcher is modified so it shows the user hardware ID and the letter number of each slot. If a SD fails, it identifies the slot with the failed card.

2

Hi there, you should be able to find that information if you mouse over the failure count.
Seems like this is something we should improve / make more obvious.

3

Hi
Thanks for the tip.
An indication on the GUI, or access to a log/error report would be great.

1 Like
4

Yeah, indeed this is something that’s in the works