hello i was fixing my buddies computer (dell) and needed to create a bootdisk to update his bios, and there was an option to create a bootable floppy or a bootable flash drive and i didn't have a floppy so i used my sandisk 1GB flash. after i copied the bootdisk files to my usb flash i restarted his computer with the usb flash connected and it did not work. the problem isn't that i couldn't update his bios because that was not really important, the real problem is that now my usb flash drive cannot be recognized by windows and i get the "USB Device Not Recognized" message on my computer whenever i connect it to the usb port. i understand the problem, and that is copying the bootdisk files to the flash drive changed the system files or whatever on the usb flash that tell windows how to handle it, and now windows sees that it isn't a regular usb flash anymore (now its a bootable disk), which is why i get the error message. i think what i want to do is reformat the usb flash outside of windows but i dont' know how to do this. ANY IDEAS??????
USB flash drive malfunction in WindowsXP
- Thread starter bryanschoen
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N3051M
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i have a dell dimension 4300 with winxp sp2 p4 1.6 GHz 512 MB RAM
the reformat link posted will not help me...i've already tried going through disk management but like i said before windows cannot recognize the drive since it doesn't see it as a flash drive anymore and nothing pops up in disk management when i plug it in to usb. like i mentioned earlier i'm pretty sure i need to reformat it outside of windows (through DOS or whatever) in order for the drive to be recognized but i don't know how to go about this...thanks for your help
the reformat link posted will not help me...i've already tried going through disk management but like i said before windows cannot recognize the drive since it doesn't see it as a flash drive anymore and nothing pops up in disk management when i plug it in to usb. like i mentioned earlier i'm pretty sure i need to reformat it outside of windows (through DOS or whatever) in order for the drive to be recognized but i don't know how to go about this...thanks for your help
N3051M
Posts: 2,094 +3
You will need access to Windows 98 somehow. Otherwise you can try using a linux distro to do so.
If you want to do this on DOS, depending on what DOS you use it should be format [drive] [/FS:File System] but i haven't used it before so take care that you don't accedentaly format your HDD.
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