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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: 5, Interesting) by Adrian Harvey on Monday March 03 2014, @08:29AM
My first guess would be that the external flag would affect write caching. Ie: an external device which might be removed at any time should have minimal or no write caching, so that the device, if removed without unmounting would be in a coherent state.
If the portable version of Windows 8 needs write caching to work, it would have been better to code an exception into the the disk driver to change the caching default for the case where the external drive is the system drive, rather than break things for all other uses.