usb flash failed... or not?

balenaEtcher
#1

Just tried to flash kubuntu onto a 16GB drive using win7/64 and latest etcher (portable).

Went afk at maybe 50% and came back to flash failed. Retried and after a few seconds, it says again: flash failed.

Curiously the drive now shows to be only a few mb big with some kb used (efi>boot>3 .efi files), in explorer. The drivemanager shows the iso size unassigned (roughly translated), 4MB EFI systempartition and the rest is again 12GB unassigned.

Unfortunately i closed the program, as it didnt show a concrete message to my noob eyes, so i dont have logs.

Does this make sense? Is the drive failing or can windows just not read it?

#3

Hello, thank you for your message and sorry for the issues.

First of all check on this link to recover your SD card.

If the balenaEtcher errors keeps happening, could you please press Ctrl+Shift+i (or Cmd+Shift+i if you are in Mac) to see the logs of the balenaEtcher. Check the errors that appear on the Console? Feel free to share your etcher version and the logs.

Thanks

#5

no worries. had another drive with an image already. Hopefully wont be on win anytime time soon again. Will try to flash again using linux on that drive. Was just curious cause it seem to have worked, i guess.

#6

Hi Frank,

If I understand correctly, you’re no longer able to reproduce this issue, as you’re not using the same machine?

If you suspect your drive might be failing, and you have access to a Linux machine, you could check it for bad blocks with the aptly named program badblocks.

Note that this program used incorrectly can destroy data, so do be careful if you use it, and make sure anything important is backed up.

Additionally, you can follow up on this thread if you can manage to reproduce the issue, or get any more information on it.

#8

well, it still exists, but the sata controller seemed to cause general issues, so might be related, but its why im not using it anymore (and because it was 14yrs old).

Thanks for this info. This might even be handy to test the HDD’s that were chkdsk’ed by the old machine.

cheers.