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posted by janrinok on Monday March 03 2014, @04:30AM   Printer-friendly
from the its-my-way-or-the-highway-said-the-Borg dept.

An Anonymous Coward belatedly writes:

"Sandisk changed the configuration, beginning in 2012, for all USB drives they make so that in future external USB devices will be seen as physical hard drives. This has been done to meet requirements set by Microsoft for Windows 8 which states that all USB devices must be configured to be recognised as fixed drives (nb. this is possibly related to Windows-to-Go). This has caused havoc for many users as Sandisk drives can no longer be used with Windows Recovery or any program that will only write to USB External devices. Sandisk deleted the support page that described why Sandisk USB drives are now configured as fixed drives, although the blog author includes it in his blog.

Beware any USB pen drive which states it is "Windows 8 certified". The device will not be detectable as an external drive in Windows 8. The HP Recovery Disks page says to avoid any Windows-8-certified USB devices."

One comment on the blog suggests that Sandisk might have reverted to more conventional practices for subsequent USB devices.

 
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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by quitte on Monday March 03 2014, @03:42PM

    by quitte (306) on Monday March 03 2014, @03:42PM (#10082) Journal

    There are two partition schemes on PCs that I'm aware of: MBR and GPT. Booting from MBR partitioned USB sticks with multiple partitions hasn't been a problem since the late Pentium 3s at least. I'd have to see it fail to boot on anything new enough for Vista myself to believe there was a problem with MBR partitioned USB sticks. Syslinux works just fine as a bootloader in such cases.

    The problem of having both GPT and MBR schemes on a single hard drive is solved, too.

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