$RECYCLE.BIN Folder keeps reappearing...

[oprez]

P.P.S. My comment about RECYCLER is irrelevant--that one gets created when the drive is plugged into an XP machine (which I do too).

It does but doesn't actually appear when connected to the TV through the blu-ray player.

 

[alphanumeric]

For what its worth, as near as I can tell my various USB thumb drives don't have the hidden recycle bin folder but my two USB external hard drives do. Size related?

 

[MilesAhead]

It is a weird thing. I use drives in USB docking stations. Even if I set them to not use the Recycle Bin, and empty my recycle bin for my system drive, when I scan with Malwarebytes it always shows scanning the recycle bin. Not just saying "scanning recycle bin" and nothing being there. It shows funky file names while doing it. Kinda' strange.

 

[oprez]

My USB thumb drives don't get added to the properties of the Recycle Bin either (when right clicking the icon on the desktop) whereas the external drives do. The external drives are USB powered too...not from the mains. It's a bit of a head scratcher this one.

 

[maxseven]

It's a bit of a head scratcher this one.

You said a mouthful!

My 32Gb USB NTFS stick does not have a $RECYCLE.BIN. Nor does my portable USB drive (spinner, 18Gb) but it's formatted FAT32.

What is striking to me is that when I look at Explorer using Tiles, all of my USB-pluggable spinners appear together with the fixed "Hard Disk Drives", and at least the NTFS ones have $RECYCLE.BINs, but the flash drives appear exclusively as "Devices with Removable Storage" and don't have $RECYCLE.BINs. And all of these appear together as one happy family under the same "Disk drives" category in Device Manager, including that the Kingston flash stick uses the same driver as the FreeAgent spinner!

I do wonder how Windows knows to treat them differently (maybe it. Again, I want to hear back from Corazon who said his USB spinner(s) don't have $RECYCLE.BINs???

P.S. In Device Mgr I see under the Volumes tab that the USB Stick w/no RECYCLE.BIN is shown as Type: Removable, and the FreeAgent spinner is shown as Type: Basic. This must be the key though I don't know how these types are established...

 

[fseal]

The devices themselves probably provide this information when queried by the mass storage driver...

Though as was mentioned, the line between thumb drive and USB mounted spinner in size, performance and use is getting thin these days

 

[MilesAhead]

The devices themselves probably provide this information when queried by the mass storage driver...

It would be interesting if anyone has USB key plugged in, look in device manager and see if it gives the performance write cache option. My docking station drives have it as an option.

 

[rraod]

The Recycle Bin only stores files deleted from hard drives, not from removable media, such as flash drives, memory cards and floppy disks. Nor does it store files deleted from network drives... That is the reason why USB thumb drives which are solid state devices do not have Recycle Bin.

I have never used a SSD, so I am not sure whether a SSD will have a Recycle Bin or not. I assume they have been built to have a Recycle Bin because they work like a fast HDD.

 

[Britton30]

I have the caching option on this 32GB USB flash drive. I also have a USB spinner and several other flash drives, none of which have the $RECYCLE.bin on them

 

[MilesAhead]

Hmm, maybe it's a coding hack to make it easier to implement the stuff. That's all I can figure.

 

[maxseven]

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.

 

[alphanumeric]

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.

 

[Corazon]

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)...

 

[maxseven]

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.

 

[alphanumeric]

@ 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.

 

[rraod]

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.

 

[alphanumeric]

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.

 

[maxseven]

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!

 

[MilesAhead]

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.

Probably calls GetDriveType() API. If you are one of the privileged to have Windows source code then I guess you could step through it to see how it determines the drive type.

edit: it probably in turn, calls this function:
DeviceIoControl()