Why does balenaEtcher change the format of the disk

linuxpartitioningsd cardUbuntu

I would like to flash Ubuntu 20.04 to a 32GB SD card to be booted in a Raspberry Pi.

I erased and formatted my SD card with the Mac Disk Utility app to MS-DOS (FAT) format with GUID Partition Map. I confirmed it was successful when I ran the terminal command "diskutil list" and saw that /dev/disk2 had these values instead of Apple-related formats like APFS.

I then flashed the Ubuntu .iso file to the SD card with the balenaEtcher app.

After this process completes, the SD card fails to boot in the Pi (the green indicator light goes out immediately), and I can check in my Mac and see that this disk is now Apple partition scheme, Apple partition map and Apple HFS. I don't see any settings in balenaEtcher discussing a choice of format for the disk, and online instructions I've seen for flashing Ubuntu recommend the steps I've taken.

How can it be that Etcher is re-formatting the disk, and how can I fix this issue?

Best Answer

You probably have the wrong version Ubuntu. Did you download the Raspberry Pi ARM64 version? The Ubuntu for Raspberry Pi I found here

https://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/21.04/release/ubuntu-21.04-preinstalled-desktop-arm64+raspi.img.xz

is an .xz archive containing

ubuntu-21.04-preinstalled-desktop-arm64+raspi.img

This is a normal .img file for Balena Etcher to make a Raspberry Pi SD card. You don't need to format the card.

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