Balena Etcher semi-breaking USB drives

[Charles U Farley]

There's some mention of this in various places, but I think it's worth pointing out.

The Linux Mint installation guide suggests using Balena Etcher to create the bootable USB stick: https://linuxmint-installation-guide.re ... /burn.html.

Balena Etcher keeps going through the process to burn the ISO, and then I get a pop-up saying my drive is 'write protected' and I end up with a blank USB. It's the same problem discussed here: https://forums.balena.io/t/balenaetcher ... ves/356589.

The explanation from Balena is not satisfactory, and I would suggest updating the Linux Mint installation guide to recommend another source.

Before saying more, I will acknowledge that I was about to get my USB drives working again using their guide, "How to Recover a USB Drive or SD Card
Using Windows" AFTER the drives were made useless: https://www.balena.io/blog/did-etcher-b ... b-sd-card/.

I tried using two USB drives.

• The first was a fresh out of the box PNY drive.
  
  The second was an older SanDisk drive with an old Mint .iso on it, but I wanted a newer version for a fresh install.

The same problem occurred on both drives, so it's clearly not a manufacturer problem. The drives weren't dead. One - the SanDisk drive - was clearly working properly immediately before trying to burn the new Mint ISO using Etcher. Something is going wrong with Balenta Etcher.

[mikeflan]

Hello and welcome to the forum.

The explanation from Balena is not satisfactory

I disagree. USB flash drives wear out. We have all seen this. Do we really want a different burner that makes do with faulty hardware, and then might not produce a good result when being used during the install? If so - make a recommendation and we will try to find someone to do the research to confirm it is a better choice.

[Charles U Farley]

Hey,

Thanks for the warm welcome and reply. I probably should have added that I'm on a not-so-great Windows 10 laptop and that I've used Mint in the past and at points and never had this problem. Also forgot to say that I first checked with PNY documentation on the brand new fresh out the box USB which didn't help, but it turns out it wasn't a PNY issue.

I was later able to burn the ISO to the old SanDisk USB stick on the first try using Rufus and can see it on there. Still dealing with the process of installing Mint on a cheap Chromebook.

My main point is that it could be a lot of things, but it seems most likely it's a software issue rather than a user or device or manufacturer issue, since there's evidence that it spans all but the first.

[linux-rox]

I was later able to burn the ISO to the old SanDisk USB stick on the first try using Rufus and can see it on there.

That's a mild sort of breaking, isn't it? I take it Rufus wasn't able to burn to the PNY drive?

FWIW, I just burned the Cinn21 ISO to flash drive with the current version of Etcher. Worked fine. And, bear in mind, it does happen occasionally that a flash drive is dead-on-arrival (has happened to me). That said, there might be an incompatibility between Etcher and some flash drive controllers, etc. This used to be a big problem. Each burn app worked for some users but not others and there wasn't much of a pattern. Things settled down a few years ago, but now the problem seems to have returned, though usually it's merely that the drive won't boot. This is the first I've heard of drives being bricked.

Anyway, be aware, Mint's developers don't participate on the Forum and, so, are unlikely to see your post. And, frankly, there are lots of reasons the Installation Guide should be updated (it's something like four years old) but there's no reason to expect that to happen anytime soon.

[Charles U Farley]

Well, I intentionally said "semi-breaking" in the title since it was possible to get it working again following their directions. But it does seem to happen enough that they need to have a guide.

I didn't try on the PNY drive, but I was able to recover that one, too. I tried the SanDisk first with Rufus and stopped when it worked.

Thanks for the reply and letting me know Etcher worked fine for you. I really mainly intended this as an FYI for the community since I didn't find much when I searched the forums but can find several reports on other websites.