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Sandisk USB Devices No Longer External

posted by janrinok on Monday March 03 2014, @12:30AM   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: 5, Informative) by mojo chan on Monday March 03 2014, @10:01AM

    by mojo chan (266) on Monday March 03 2014, @10:01AM (#10033)

    Actually the problem is with BIOS vendor's code. If the disk appears as an external device the BIOS will try to boot it in a different want to a fixed disk. The BIOS expects external drives to have one partition in a very specific format, not suitable for Windows To Go.

    Microsoft had two choices. They could hack around getting Windows To Go working with the old single partition system, but it is considered legacy and depreciated. Alternatively they could ask vendors to produce compatible drives and mark them as Windows 8 compatible, but in doing so break everyone else's code and violate the USB spec. I'd have preferred the former option.

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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 03 2014, @11:40AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 03 2014, @11:40AM (#10081)

    They could also have chosen a third route: Only certify computers as Windows 8 compliant if they can boot from multi-partition external disks.