Some 16Gb MicroSD cards are reported “too small” and reported at 15.5Gb, when cloning a 16Gb source MicroSD card. Specifically, all of our cards from Delkin V10 16Gb and SwissBit V30 16Gb cannot be cloned to as targets from a 16Gb MicroSD source. We don’t experience this issue with SanDisk Ultra 16Gb MicroSD cards.
Interestingly enough, both the exact cards reported as too small in the EtcherPro burn successfully from a source image (size 14,062,500 Kb) in Etcher v1.13.3 on Windows.
Hi @GlenG, are you sure that the source drive you are trying to clone is the same as the target? Did you try to clone from Delkin to Delkin or from SwissBit to SwissBit. What could be happening here is that the Sandisk could be a few MBs or KBs larger than the other brands and therefore it’s normal that it can’t flash to it. Remember that cloning copies everything in the card including empty space, not just actual used data. On Etcher on windows it works because you are using a source image which it seems is well within the drive capacity while when cloning the only thing that matters is that the actual total drive size of the source should be equal or smaller than the actual total drive size of the target(s).
Hope that helps, happy to assist you further if needed.
16GB is a small disk. This in itself is not a problem but there ARE variations in disk size between different manufacturers and at that small of a disk I’m guessing it could make a difference depending on the type of clone you are trying to do. For instance is you are telling the software that the source disk and the target disk must be the same, in other words byte per byte they are the same, when going from a disk that is slightly bigger to one that’s smaller that could become a problem. If you are making a clone where the software can adjust the size of the target partition that can often work better but since I don’t use this software much I can’t give you a firm answer on something like this where currently I just don’t remember the different options you have if any when cloning. I have typically used this to take a disk image and burn that to a USB drive in which case I don’t often run into problems but if I do there are other choices for doing that exact thing. Being that I’m on a BalenaEtcher forum it would feel strange to give other choices for doing that task but it’s not the same thing as cloning a disk anyway. I also know good software specifically for cloning but they want a yearly subscription instead of a buy once kind of license and I REALLY dislike it when companies do that and tend to stop using it. But it has the options to adjust partition sizes and I’m guessing would handle what you’re doing just fine.
Why is it you have to clone these disks? Do they have an OS on them? If it’s just data you could copy one disk to another. That’s much better than cloning.
@dlb31, yes the SD cards have u-boot/linux partitions on them and using EtcherPro to clone 15x at a time. The previous answer nailed it … diff manufacturers have varying useable space on their SD cards; nominally .2-.5Gb. My method now uses Etcher on Windows to burn the first image to the SD card with the least usable space, and use it as the Source for the clone in EtcherPro.