Ran balenaEtcher, flashed my SSD, it's now gone

balenaEtcher
1

So I bought a Retrobit n64 controller and was excited to get it to work so I downloaded this software it told me to download and install. Used it on my SSD boot drive, now after flashing it, it’s literally missing and I can’t bring it back, can anybody please help this is horrible.

2

Hello Michael, welcome to our forums!

I’m not familiar with the Retrobit n64 controller, could you please elaborate a bit more into what you had to flash and where? It would also be very helpful if you could point us to the instructions you followed.

In general, balenaEtcher just copies whatever you downloaded to the drive. If you open up balenaEtcher again, do you still see the drive?

Cheers,
Nico.

4

Okay so, I have an HDD, and an SSD I use to boot my PC. I use both to store files. Currently, theres no trace the SSD existed. I basically flashed an image to the SSD then it disappeared. Turns out I didn’t even need the image but I’m really worried I just got rid of most of my files.

5

Also, the software i used was the software from this site, the balena etcher software which flashed my drive and I dont know what that means.

6

@infinitymania when you use etcher to flash a drive, all the contents of the drive will be replaced by the image you downloaded. That’s what balenaEtcher is used for.

I’ll ping the team internally but I don’t think there’s an easy way to recover the files that were in the drive.

Cheers.

8

I’m using a program to try and recover the files but that’s extremely worrying.

9

Well is there any way to turn the hardrive back to normal? It’s not being picked up by my computer and a bunch of services say its RAW now instead of NTFS

10

No.
I think you definitely loose all the information on the SSD.
Maybe you can recover something using a low level tool, but as far as I know you loose everything.

11

Hey, as @ntzovanis mentioned that it is expected that Etcher will replace the drives content, so we have little scope of getting the data back, if you wish to use the SSD normally again, you’ll need to re-format it to your format of choice, how to do re-format will depend on your OS.