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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.
(Score: 1) by dwywit on Monday March 03 2014, @10:27PM
That's the theory. In practice, OEM Win XP would continue to validate itself on a new install. If on the rare occasion it refused, a phone call would quickly get another validation code after speaking to a MS rep. "Customer's machine suffered a power surge and needed a {mainboard/CPU/memory} replacement".
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
(Score: 2) by mojo chan on Monday March 03 2014, @11:24PM
I must have made hundreds of those calls... As you say, their Indian staff never ever refused to activate the machine.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
(Score: 1) by EvilJim on Tuesday March 04 2014, @04:43AM
Same here, didn't get to talk to indian staff though, it's been all keypad presses for at least a couple of years for XP. why would it matter what the disk enumerates as under linux? there aren't any restrictions on running your OS from a USB drive like there are on XP (cant say I've tried installing 7 or 8 so cant comment on those)