$RECYCLE.BIN Folder keeps reappearing...

Britton30 said:

I also have a USB spinner and several other flash drives, none of which have the $RECYCLE.bin on them

The spinner should have a RECYCLE.BIN--all mine do--I wonder why yours does not. Corazon said his didn't either.

Couldn't be Home Premium vs. Ultimate (I don't think) but this is very curious to me.

The largest USB flash drive I have is 16 gigs and it doesn't have a recycle bin folder. My 150 gig (IDE desktop) USB drive and 40 gig (IDE laptop) USB drive both have it. My guess is if its ID'd as a hard drive, mechanical or SSD, it gets a recycle bin.

About RECYCLER vs. $RECYCLE.BIN - I'm not 100% sure but pretty confident the former is created by Windows XP and the latter by Windows 7 (and I guess Vista too)...

alphanumeric said:

My guess is if its ID'd as a hard drive, mechanical or SSD, it gets a recycle bin.

I think it has something to do with the type of partition that is formatted onto the disk; in reading MS docs e.g. spinners will have a MBR but flash will not.

I'm thinking maybe a tool that formats flash drives (HP's comes to mind) maybe could apply a flash-type partition to the OP's spinner??? Maybe I will try it--this puzzle has me intrigued.

Yeah RECYCLER is irrelevant to W7 as it's been created from plugging-in to an XP pc.

@ maxseven, Windows is obviously keying on something, its anybodies guess what though. All my drives including my flash drives are formated in NTFS, it that matters.

The controller interfaces the drive part with the computer, whether it is a spinner, SSD, Flash Memory or Memory card (Compact flash, SD cards etc.). The controller signals to the computer whether it is a removable disk or HDD.

If the controller says it is an emulation of HDD, whether it is a spinner or SSD, operating system will treat this drive as a fixed drive (eventhough it is a USB drive) and will group it with the fixed hard disks of the system.

If the controller says it is an emulation of removable drive, then operating system will treat this drive as a removable drive and will group it with removable drives.

It is the operating system which creates a recycle bin for fixed hard drives and no recycle bin for removable drives.

That seems to make sense. My USB external hard drive does in fact show up in the Hard Disk Drives section while my thumb drive shows up under Drives with Removable Storage.

I'm pretty sure now that the culprit is something called the Removable Media Bit (RMB). If you google it you'll find that it is possible with some USB flash devices to use a tool called LexarBootIt to flip that bit and enable users to e.g. partition their flash sticks.

In the OP's case he'd want to flip it the other way, to make his USB drive look like a removable drive, so Windows doesn't give it a $RECYCLE.BIN. But from everything I've read, this "understanding" (that the USB spinner is *not* a removable device) occurs at the controller-requests-from-hardware level. Here's a sampler from Microsoft, which discusses the opposite of what we want but you'll get the point:

Q. What must I do to trigger AutoRun on my USB storage device?
The AutoRun capabilities are restricted to CD-ROM drives and fixed disk drives. If you need to make a USB storage device perform AutoRun, the device must not be marked as a removable media device and the device must contain an Autorun.inf file and a startup application.
The removable media device setting is a flag contained within the SCSI Inquiry Data response to the SCSI Inquiry command. Bit 7 of byte 1 (indexed from 0) is the Removable Media Bit (RMB). An RMB set to zero indicates that the device is not a removable media device. An RMB of one indicates that the device is a removable media device. Drivers obtain this information by using the StorageDeviceProperty request.

Of course, here again they're talking about making a fixed device into a removable one, not the other way around, but it's interesting nonetheless.

I've read that it may be possible to write a "filter" to intercept the comms and thereby fool Windows into thinking a removable-is-a-fixed, but I only found one from Hitachi which operates withing 32-bit XP only, and merely serves the opposite of what the OP needs.

For the best info on this, see "Removable or what" from Uwe Sieber:

Tips for USB pen drives

oprez, I'm afraid there's little hope here!