Please Help! I have ‘ruined’ 3 sd cards already. I am trying to flash OctoPi onto a 32GB card and it seems to work, then when it goes to validate it gets to about 15% and stops saying the flash failed. When I look at the card, it has no media, I can’t access it and windows won’t let me format it or do anything with it. Is there a way to fix these cards? Thanks in advance.
UPDATE: I tried following the steps to restore a SDS card and these are the results:
Hi @kenvida, welcome to the forums!
First things first, it’s extremely unlikely that etcher damaged your cards so don’t worry about it. We wrote a blog post with details on how to recover SD cards that appear to be faulty: Etcher killed my USB stick … or did it? Please check it out and see if that helps.
Regarding the problem itself, I notice you are running on Windows, can you share what version you are using? That might help us figure out why validation is failing on your cards. Also, is it failing consistently as in every flash fails to validate?
Hi thanks for the welcome.
ver is windows 10, etcher is 1.5.116. It has failed consistently with 3 different sd cards and adapters. all three now show no media. The screenshot provided shows what happened when I followed the steps you mentioned above
Hello @kenvida
When this problem occurs please could you press Ctrl-Shift-I in Etcher and post the text output from the Console tab here. Thanks.
If your getting “No Media” from Windows I don’t think there is any way back from that, your device is “Dead”. Same thing happened to me with a usb flash drive. Windows can see it but can’t access it. I’ve got two suggestions, if your flashing an ISO file use “Rufus”, it works flawlessly. If your flashing an image file ( .img ) use “HDD Raw Copy”, again it works flawlessly. Find both of them on Google. I suspect the problem with Etcher is it gets corrupted after being used a few times so you could try uninstalling it then install a fresh copy
Hi all,
Thanks for trying to help. It seems I have a few different problems that I was only able to isolate by trial and error and a lot of patience. Basically I had three SD cards and 2 adapters and out of the set I had 1 bad adapter and 1 bad sd card. I was eventually able to use the partdisk:clean command and recover the 2, the the third is dead. Again thanks for trying to help. it was not a Etcher issue, it was a bad luck in the combination of hardware.
Just closing my “ticket” 
)
Ken
Thanks Ken - for the detailed update. Bad luck indeed - but good to see you were able to patiently figure out.
