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Old Zorin Forum archive → Installation

Balenetcher Destroys USB Drives

kpinvt

Mon Apr 27, 2020 1:03:03 pm

Balenetcher destroyed two of my 16GB thumb drives by formatting them both to 2.29MB FAT. I don't know how to reformat them back to 16GB.

Aravisian

Mon Apr 27, 2020 1:27:51 pm

I will admit, I really don't like Balena etcher and I never have. Most people seem to have no trouble with it... I sure did.
Many recommend Rufus. I prefer Unetbootin because it never failed me. Others disagree...
To format your USB drives, you can use any number of tools. Gparted can be used or just about another other "etcher" for writing to USB such as rufus or Unetbootin. Exact instructions will depend on which app you use.
It sounds like your USB drives were formatted with a partition and you are only accessing the partition formatted to FAT32.
I would recommend starting by examining the drive using Gparted.

kpinvt

Mon Apr 27, 2020 5:15:48 pm

I used Rufus 3.10 to successfully write to one of the two damaged USB drives. The other damaged drive was thrown in the trash before trying Rufus. Balena Etcher has been deleted from my Win 10 system

carmar

Sun May 17, 2020 4:27:26 am

Fix USB: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=recover+usb+diskpart

Unetbootin is a good alternative: http://unetbootin.github.io/

schwenky

Sun Jun 14, 2020 1:47:43 am

Maybe you flashed zorin lite? Had to change it from MBR to GPT to use it again. Used Easeus partition.

MuTeK

Mon Jun 15, 2020 2:02:43 pm

Thank you for the hints, guys
I kinda panicked after I have first discovered that Windows failed to format or properly read the flash pens I used for testing system installations.
However BalenaEtcher itself could still rewrite them.
The drives are alive again, revived by Rufus :-)