Error "Something went wrong." while flashing image with balenaEtcher

[Seb-tech77]

Hello, I have a problem when writing the image of orange pi 3 lts on my sd card, balena etcher puts me an error while with other images it works perfectly. Could you help me?

Cordially

[MichaIng]

Thanks for reporting. Does it work with rufus?

[Seb-tech77]

Indeed, I had not tested with rufus, it seems to work. I would test to see if the boot card correctly

[MichaIng]

I remember such was reported before. I guess we need to check which problem extractly BelanaEtcher has with our .img.xz files. Btw did you extract it beforehand or selected the xz archive as is?

[Seb-tech77]

Hello, I extracted the disk image from the archive and copied it with balenaetcher

[MichaIng]

Ah okay, so the archive is not the problem. Probably the last partition needs to be a little larger than the last filesystem. We currently size it tight.

[Seb-tech77]

okay, no worries. I'll do this with rufus then if it works. Thanks for your help

[MichaIng]

And did it work with Rufus?

[Seb-tech77]

Hi, sorry I totally forgot to test.

I tested starting up with rufus and it boots fine and I get no errors.

[MichaIng]

I just tried it with a NanoPi M6 image, and it worked well. I first tried it selecting the compressed xz file, which it extracts automatically internally. Then I extracted it manually, and selected that one, and it worked as well.

Then I tried with the Orange Pi 3 LTS image, and it failed with the same error you were showing. This is weird, since the image has been updated in the meantime, has a different size etc. I was expected that balenaEtcher might expect images to be e.g. sized to round 4 MiB sizes or something like that.

I tried a bunch of other images then, also with same kernel, and all succeeded. Then I tried the Orange Pi 3 LTS image again, which previously failed, and for whatever reason it succeeded 🤔. It failed 2 times previously. No idea what to think of this. I also downloaded it again, and it still works. I guess if anyone faces this issue again, we need to ask at Etcher GitHub repo how to better debug it: https://github.com/balena-io/etcher/issues

Actually there is a matching report already: balena-io/etcher#4396

EDIT: Seems to be a well known older problem, with lots of similar reports all over the place: https://github.com/balena-io/etcher/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20state%3Aopen%20something%20went%20wrong
That I see no single developer/maintainer response, makes me think whether we should not promote Etcher anymore in our docs, but recommend alternative tools, like Rufus for Windows 🤔. People report all sorts of different solutions, but that I first ran into the error and then not anymore, without changing anything and not even restarting Etcher in between, makes me think it is just not happening every time, but is some random failure. So people change something, and then randomly it works, but not because of the change they did. Typical case of false conclusion, because people to not properly replicate error and fix.