Removable Flash Drive Recognized as a Local Disk and not a Flash Drive

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  1. Posts : 3
    Home Premium x64
       #1

    Removable Flash Drive Recognized as a Local Disk and not a Flash Drive


    I recently purchased a 32 GB San Disk Flash Drive. The security files pre-installed on the drive were junk, and I could not delete them so I formatted the drive to remove them. This cleaned the disk, and it holds data, but I'm not sure if this is part of my problem. I am trying to load my copy of windows 7 onto this disk, and using the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download tool, I can select my ISO file, but when I go to select my USB drive, my computer does not recognize the flash drive as a flash drive. Is there a way to change the Flash Drive so Windows will recognize my Flash Drive as removable media? Smaller USB drives still work on my computer, so its not the computer. Anyone have any suggestions?
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  2. Posts : 6,292
    Windows 7 64 Bit Home Premium SP1
       #2

    Hello masonta. Welcome to the forum.

    Let's start with this: can you post a screenshot of your Disk Management window, expanded so we can read everything, with the USB stick installed?

    You also might check in Device Manager to see if the stick shows up as a USB device, or a hard disk.
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  3. Posts : 3
    Home Premium x64
    Thread Starter
       #3

    The Flash Drive is Disk G, and I also uploaded a screen shot of my device manager where the flash was listed as a hard drive. Thanks for timely response btw
    Attached Thumbnails Attached Thumbnails Removable Flash Drive Recognized as a Local Disk and not a Flash Drive-disk-managment.png   Removable Flash Drive Recognized as a Local Disk and not a Flash Drive-device-manager.png  
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  4. Posts : 18,415
    windows 7 home 64bit
       #4

    Hi there .. This is quite a common problem with some Flash Drives .. Have seen it many times on the forum ..
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  5. whs
    Posts : 26,210
    Vista, Windows7, Mint Mate, Zorin, Windows 8
       #5

    Reformat it to NTFS and see whether that works.
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  6. Posts : 3
    Home Premium x64
    Thread Starter
       #6

    I used the quick format to NTFS, that hasn't helped. I'm currently formatting the flash with the "quick format" option unchecked. Will see if that changes things...
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  7. Posts : 6,292
    Windows 7 64 Bit Home Premium SP1
       #7

    I've got a feeling it has to do with the fact that the stick was marked ACTIVE in order to install the OS on it.

    Doing a full format will probably get rid of the ACTIVE flag, but if it doesn't then do this:
    Partition - Mark as Inactive
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  8. whs
    Posts : 26,210
    Vista, Windows7, Mint Mate, Zorin, Windows 8
       #8

    Let us know how you are doing. Will be useful input for the future.
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  9. Posts : 9,746
    Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit sp1
       #9

    As well as the solutions already suggested by TVeblen & whs try formatting it as a FAT32, which I think they are originally.
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  10. Posts : 3
    Windows 7 Ultimate x64
       #10

    Yes this happens to me to this is how new windows and flash drives are they do this for security and it's a requirement for windows 8 / 8.1 so new flash drives are setup that way
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