Need help flashing OS to MicroSD card

Autonomous Machines Jetson & Embedded Systems Jetson Nano
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Hello all,

I am an engineering student doing research. I am setting up our new Jetson Nano, but for the life of me, I can’t get the OS to flash to the MicroSD card. I have tried flashing it multiple times on multiple SD cards (32 and 64GB) and on multiple computers (desktop and laptop) and used the software direct from the ‘getting started’ page of NVIDIA, but when the Etcher software is finished flashing, multiple removable drives show up in File Explorer and I get about 20 pop-up windows from File Explorer saying things like “You need to format the drive” and “The parameter is incorrect”.

I have flashed many Raspberry Pis using Etcher, but I have never had so many problems. Any suggestions on how I can get my Nano working? Perhaps another method of getting the OS onto the SD card?

Thanks in advance.

Edit: If it matters, the MicroSD cards that I used are a Samsung Evo Plus 64GB and a Sandisk Ultra Class 10 32GB.

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So, When you get those pop-ups, you can just eject the card, stick it in the nano, and apply power. The reason those pop-ups show up is because Windows tries to mount every partition on an external disk a soon as it’s connected. One can imagine some “hilarity” you can could cause with this (the maximum number of GPT partitions on windows is 128 apparently).

So far as I know there’s no way around this other than to just dismiss every dialog box or flash from another OS. There is probably a registry entry somewhere that can disable this behavior but I don’t know of it off hand. Warning: If you click format for any of them, you’ll have to start over and reflash.

The reason the Pi doesn’t cause this behavior is because the first partition is fat, which Windows recognizes, and then ignore the rest of the disk which is ext formatted. However the Nano’s partition layout is different and Windows doesn’t deal with it nicely. This isn’t exactly a Windows bug, but the default behavior leaves a lot to be desired.

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Ok, that kinda makes sense. I will try to boot the Nano with the one I just flashed and see if it works. Thanks.

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Yw. If Etcher reported it sucessfully flashed, it did a verification pass, so everything shuould be ready to boot.

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Yes, I popped the SD card in the Nano and it booted. I just assumed that all of the 20 pop-ups meant that the SD card was corrupted after the flash. But at least I learned something new.

Thanks again.

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Ya. It’s confusing for sure. There is a question about it at least once a month or so. Glad you got it working!

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