![]() ![]() The method you use to restore a device depends upon the operating system your computer uses. How to Recover a USB Drive or SD Card Using Windows If you think you might be in this situation, here are some tips to help you regain access to your device. Again, it’s likely that you might be in need of a new drive, though sometimes re-flashing can help, and data that didn’t stick the first time might just stick the second time.Īlternatively, as mentioned earlier, the other common “dead” device that we see on a regular basis is actually not dead at all: it’s just not recognized and understood by your computer. The installation process could halt, the Raspberry Pi might not boot, or other types of system crashes could occur. The drive doesn’t realize that the data did not persist or get safely stored in each cell, and happily reports that things completed successfully! But when you go to use the drive later and Ubuntu, Raspbian, or another operating system expects to find data in a specific location, and then that data isn’t there, it’s not going to be very happy. Windows users may get a false-positive result here on occasion though, as Windows creates a folder on the drive in between the writing and verification stages. Verification stage errors likely indicate faulty sectors on the device. If the flash fails during the “writing” stage, the drive is probably dying, and it may be time for a new one. The flash fails (either during the “writing stage,” or later, in the “verification” stage): Etcher reports that the flash was unsuccessful. ![]() To be more precise, Etcher attempts to write data, the drive accepts the data to be written, but the storage bins responsible for keeping all the 1’s and 0’s don’t do their job and permanently hold the data. Once the storage blocks on the device begin to fail, the drive may certainly become unusable if it does not have some wear leveling built in that can compensate for the failing blocks and move the data to healthy blocks. Unfortunately, SD Cards and USB drives absolutely can wear out, and have limited write cycles that they can sustain. The application can only write the contents of the provided image file byte-by-byte to the storage medium on the chosen device. I see that scenario play out quite a bit on our Forums, so I thought I’d take a few minutes to explain the process of recovering a “broken” device.įirst and foremost, Etcher is completely incapable of “bricking” or killing a drive– it just doesn’t have that kind of functionality. Unfortunately, there are some rare exceptions where a flash is unsuccessful, or, more commonly, a user flashes a Linux image but then does not realize that their Windows or Mac PC can’t read its contents. ![]() Etcher can write Raspbian to an SD Card for a Raspberry Pi, flash Ubuntu, Fedora, and other popular Linux distributions to USB drives to boot a PC, or write out the contents of an existing disk image for archival purposes.Įtcher is used millions of times per month to successfully write USB sticks and SD Cards. We use Etcher, our open source image flashing utility, that’s quite popular in the community. Our team flashes hundreds of SD Cards a week while experimenting and deploying devices. Learn how to determine if this happens to your tiny data drive and get some tips on how to make it usable again.Īs you can probably guess by the types of projects we build and the contents of our blog posts, we are big fans of the Raspberry Pi, Jetson Nano, and similar single board computers here at balena. We put USB sticks and SD cards through a lot of work (and abuse), and sometimes it leaves them in a state where they’re unreadable. ![]()
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