Etcher killed my USB stick

You can use the “Rasperry Pi Imager” (official and free) to resolve this issue; Simply launch it, click “Choose Storage” and then format the drive.

Yo man that’s not what should happen luckily like windows has a partition manager could delete and format every thing an reallocate the whole USB. Otherwise a windows tumb drive and the USB also plugged in can also do the work. As well as with Ubuntu or other distro s that come with partition management

Hi, I’ve run into a similar problem but apparently pretty novel because I can’t seem to find anyone who has the exact same issue as me after searching for hours. Basically diskpart reports success when deleting the partition, but if I do list partitions again, the partition is still there. This also happens on every partition software i’ve tried, such as minitool partition wizard. I hit apply and it reports success but the partition remains. “clean” in diskpart fails with an error about semaphore timeout.
on linux i’ve tried deleting the partition with the disks tool, and also attempted “create partition table” with gparted which just froze the second I hit apply
I’m at a complete loss for what to do, because all of the stuff that people are like “OMG THAT WORKED” don’t work for me.

you can use Rufus or diskpart utility

Hello.
Wellp, it happens that I also decided to try out Etcher, and another USB drive bite the dust.
After the flashing procedure fail my USB drive started showing up in Windows file explorer in a “see-through” manner, like if it were a removable media reader/writer without media.
I’ve run the above described procedure by Ereski (Etcher killed my USB stick - #64 by Ereski) using diskpart, and Windows even stopped recognizing the drive in its file explorer. At first I could select the disk in diskpart, and it appeared like a media reader/writer without media (capacity 0 bytes). I ran the “clean” command, although the create partition command and etc. didn’t work.
I stopped there, as I was using my nephew’s laptop in his business and had to leave. I recall diskpart starting to recognize the drive capacity again after the above tinkering, but something was still not working, and Windows file explorer lost track of the drive.
I also read here: Etcher broke my USB · Issue #2102 · balena-io/etcher · GitHub. And I will tell you something: it’s hard not to be judgmental with you, Balena devs or staff. There’s something very wrong with your Windows software, but you keep evading your responsibility (blaming Windows, or blaming whatever). This is NOT the way to fix your problems. Assume your responsibility, recognize there is something wrong going on with your software, and fix your shite is what you must do instead. :unamused:
Will post something else at a later time.

Just tried to create a linux boot stick under Windows 10. At the end of the process Windows 10 was complaining without being asked, that the stick was unformatted. Obviously Etcher removes the old file system (FAT32, NTFS, etc) and partition from the stick, and for some reasons Windows 10 is unable to recognize the new filesystem. Funny thing, my older Windows 7 here can read the stick without any issues, so there is some kind of regression in Windows 10.

All the people here complaining about their sticks having been bricked, should simply try to reformat the stick to FAT32 or NTFS, either using Windows partitioning tool, or reformat the stick under Linux or Windows 7 (if available). The sticks probably don’t get bricked in most cases, it’s just Windows 10 having some issues.

Imo the best approach for the future would be, if Etcher could simply leave the existing filesystem (usually FAT32, NTFS) as it was.

ibmhal5678, of course not everyone is on the same boat here. What I mean with this is that Etcher does not always breaks the USB sticks in the same way. In my particular case Etcher gave some sort of error during the bootable creation procedure in Windows 10, and the USB stick got screwed-up. Literally.
Of course I knew the drive couldn’t (or shouldn’t) be really hardware damaged, just somehow seriously messed up as Windows and even Linux were identifying it as an empty drive. Using OS (Windows, Linux) standard disk management tools I could briefly make ‘em recognize the drive capacity, but it was momentary and beyond that there was no progress (couldn’t delete drive partitions or re-create them).
I ended up repairing the drive using this tutorial: How to repair your USB flash drive easily with “ChipGenius” @ TutoPb.
Thanks to ChipGenius’ information, I went to FlashBoot.ru to obtain related information. Thanks to it I downloaded Phison Format & Restore (v3.26.0.0) tool, and I could repair the drive.
So the problem with Etcher actually exists, inarguably. This likely is due to Etcher’s developers having difficulties with Windows (due to pernicious judgmental beliefs about it or whatever). :face_with_monocle:

So, I don’t know how but when flashing my USB stick for some odd reason it created every single drive available within the USB. I can’t really explain it…
Here are some screen shots

Basically I am flashing chromium os to my usb so I can boot Chrome OS to my laptop. And it flashed successfully and broke my usb stick, So now I need to go into file management and remove all these drives. What happened?

Same problem here, trying to flash Lineage OS 17.1 on my 32gig SD Card, while the process is underway Windows ask to format 4/5 different drive locations (I:, K:, etc) and then the flash fail.
At this point it’s probably a common problem not caused by balena.

I had this issue with Mint as well. I think it’s an issue with Windows if removable drive default action is unset because that’s the only time I’ve had the issue. Tried for an hour and even diskpart couldn’t fix it. Oddly enough, using Rufus without an image and non bootable variable to format it fixed it. Unfortunately Rufus doesn’t play well with large drives and only formats as NTFS so certain distros such as Parrot and BlackArch choke.