etcher: Etcher is corrupting SD and USB drives.

@franknfurther Etcher doesn’t destroy any hardware, it “just” copies the disk image to whatever device you choose – if your operating system doesn’t recognize any file systems on the flashed device (or fails to format it), it’s still not broken. While we’ve occasionally seen cases where the hardware does give up; it was due to counterfeit, faulty, old hardware or malfunctioning SD-card readers / USB hubs etc.

this needs some more serious testing before being released to the world

Believe it or not, we do actually test what we make, and use it every day on countless devices – and so do a couple hundred thousand other people on this planet. Doesn’t mean it’s bug-free though.

So I just successfully flashed two new cards. Seems my SD card was really broken. Apologies for accusing Etcher.

Thanks for getting back to me! Running Etcher Version 1.3.1 on OS 10.13.4. I flashed 2018-03-13-raspbian-stretch-lite onto the microSD. I did it 2-3 times over the course of an afternoon because the boot partition wasn’t showing up that would allow me to set up the Raspi without an external screen. Now the card doesn’t show up anymore and gets incredibly hot. I am going to buy another one tomorrow to test this.

Etcher is corrupting SD and USB drives. Why?

Contributors will tell you it’s all your fault, Etcher has nothing to do with it. BS! I havent used Etcher since my last corruption. Just use your terminal commands and you should be good. I’m surprised Etcher is even suggested as a tool by the Linux websites.

I keep getting comments in my inbox and largely ignored them regarding this issue as I stopped using this tool as all I can say for certain:

1. I have never had an issue with Win32DiskImager which I believe was the recommended way to flash from windows for raspbian, in times past.
2. Etcher has worked fine for a 4 of 6 cards.
3. Etcher failed two cards in a row (5/6 and 6/6) using the same card reader, different host machine (USB HW), and the cards were completely different brands. The odds are small but I the more probabilistic answer is that I got two bad SD cards, if I had more to waste I would have formatted via dd or Win32DiskImager, verified, then reformatted with Etcher. Because I do not want to risk a third card I am not going to sling mud in one direction but what I do wish is that there was some logging past what I could find in the windows logs that could help in diagnosing the issue, I don’t use windows often so maybe I missed where the logs pertaining to disk imaging is located but from what I found, the OS logs contained minimal information at best. I understand the frustration on both sides but as a developer for both private and open source software I guess I would provide diagnostics, even if just gathering existing logs such that I could better understand the true occurrence of the problem (opt. in reporting) and compare that to the statistical likelihood of a bad SD card per vendor, some card writers vid:pid tending to have HW/driver issues, etc. … it would quash any doubts I had about my software and at least allow for me to point to the gathered statistics as reasonable evidence that it truly is just the odds of getting a bad card or problematic writers.

I guess why I care is because I want to side with the contributors but having this happen to me and the odds being so small that it was two new cards in a row along with the fact that the tool is promoted over the older methods right on the raspbian website the general response seems dismissive, maybe understandably so but can a dev at least answer this:

1. Is there any more diagnostic information that could be coalesced?
2. Has an opt in feature to check the relevant HW and OS version for reporting purposes been proposed or implemented and I just did not read closely enough? Would this be considered?

Edit: I did not consider the case of an extension cable and USB 3.0, I am not certain I used 3.0 in the case that Etcher did work but I am certain I used 3.0 ports in the case where it did not. This says nothing definitive but should be noted.

Interesting to see that authors of other disk-writing software also get just as many unsubstantiated complaints about the software “breaking” their drives https://github.com/pbatard/rufus/issues/313 🙄

I guess if a “wipe” button is added to Etcher (i.e. overwriting the MBR and/or GPT with zeros), you need to make it clear that this is different to “format”, and the user will still need to use their OS’s formatting tools before they’re able to use it as a “normal” USB drive again. (as on Windows, the drive may need to be formatted as FAT16, FAT32, NTFS or ExFAT, depending on the drive’s size and physical medium. And of course OSX and Linux have their own native FSes too)

hi, I’m having a similar issue, I’ve tried flashing Chromium OS on 2 different thumb drives (1 brand new, 1 used) both have same results when I try to clean using diskpart. I had to reflash these drives because i figured i had the wrong architecture because these flashed drives couldn’t boot, but was recognized by BIOS. also, My windows 7 x64 system keeps saying the drive is ‘write protected’. I did follow a thread to add in a registry edit to disable Media Write Protection HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\StorageDevicePolicies Look for a key named WriteProtect.

and i tried using diskpart to clear the readOnly status on the drive, attributes disk clear readonly

but the two methods did not work.

DISKPART> list disk

Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt

---

Disk 0 Online 1863 GB 0 B * Disk 1 Online 558 GB 0 B Disk 2 Online 14 GB 14 GB

DISKPART> select disk 2

Disk 2 is now the selected disk.

DISKPART> clean

DiskPart has encountered an error: Incorrect function. See the System Event Log for more information.

DISKPART>

I’m so sorry to hear that you’ve had a bad experience with Etcher so far. I know it probably doesn’t help you much, but I can assure you that for most users it works absolutely fine.

For the SD cards, it’s always worth checking that the write-protect switch hasn’t accidentally moved into the ‘locked’ position. What errors do you get when you try running the dd instructions from https://github.com/resin-io/etcher/blob/master/docs/USER-DOCUMENTATION.md#gnulinux ? Are you able to ‘repair’ your drives using the official SD Formatter tool on Windows? Are you using an internal or an external SD card reader? (sometimes USB card readers are more reliable than internal readers)

In “normal operation” there shouldn’t be any need to reformat the cards / USB drives before writing an image to them with Etcher, it should “just work” regardless of what was on the cards previously.

Are you sure your cards are “genuine”, or is it possible that they’re fakes that you’ve bought e.g. from eBay? If you want to be certain, you could try testing them with F3 (on Linux) or H2testw (on Windows).