Win32 Disk Imager

There’s a thread on the Raspberry Pi forums from August 2014, still active in 2026, where a user named salka can’t write his 8 GB IMG backup to a brand new 8 GB SD card. Same brand on both. Identical advertised capacity. The Windows machine hasn’t changed. Win32 Disk Imager keeps throwing a “too small” error and refusing to write. Eight years later, that thread still gets bum...

Last winter I watched a buddy of mine spend most of a Sunday wondering why his “complete” backup of a failing 1 TB drive was a fraction of the original size. He’d dragged the visible files across to an external disk, called it a backup, and was confident the operating system would boot from it. It wouldn’t. The boot sector was missing. The partition table was missing. The rec...

I’m sitting here with a 32 GB SanDisk Ultra USB stick that’s flashed Ubuntu more times than I can count. Three of those were this past weekend, because I was helping a friend dual boot Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on a Lenovo IdeaPad with Windows 11 24H2 already installed and BitLocker active, and the first two attempts taught me things I’d forgotten since 2023. Different ISO mode, diffe...

I bought a 64 GB SanDisk Ultra Fit a couple of weeks back to flash a BIOS update onto my old Gigabyte motherboard, and the second I plugged it into my Windows 11 24H2 desktop and right-clicked Format, the FAT32 option just wasn’t there. Only NTFS and exFAT showed up in the dropdown. The motherboard’s update tool refuses to read anything that isn’t FAT32, so I had a perfectly ...

I burnt my first ISO in 2008. It was a Ubuntu 8.04 disc, on a stack of TDK CD-Rs my dad bought from Staples. Eighteen years later I’m still doing the same job, except the destination’s a USB stick instead of a disc, the ISO’s Windows 11 24H2 instead of Hardy Heron, and the tool list has gotten genuinely confusing. There are 30+ “ISO burner” programs floating around online in ...