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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: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 03 2014, @08:42AM
Those who want to indicate a dislike to Microsofts business tactics are the ones writing MSFT.
The $ sign is from the good old days, when Microsofts main product was BASIC - real BASIC with line numbers, not the modern Visual stuff.
Back then, variables were one or two letters, plus a character indicating the type of variable. A was a floating point variable, A% was integer (but all calculations were done in floating point, so using an integer variable was actually slower) and A$ was a string variable. And yes, you could have all three A variables at the same time.
So, if you needed 13 string variables, and started with A$, B$, C$ - variable number 13 would be called M$, which looks almost like MS.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 03 2014, @05:52PM
I tend to think that's a wonderful piece of creative history. Nicely done.
But "Informative" ?
Really, guys? That's not why anyone EVER used "M$".
Mod it funny if you want, but not "Informative".