I bought a SanDisk Glide today with the thought that I would be able to use it to create a bootable disk for installing Windows 7 on one of my machines (my last large-enough flash drive finally died, after 5 years). However, Windows detects this new flash drive as a fixed disk, and NOT a removable disk.
Sure, you can still read and write to the drive, but literally every single solution for creating bootable USBs from disk images requires that the drive be marked as removable. This drive is useless to me. I cannot use it, which puts me in a really tough spot since I needed to get this reinstallation done today.
A quick Google search shows that apparently this is an intentional “feature.” If anyone knows how to fix this “feature,” please tell me, otherwise I’ll really have no choice to return this and go buy a flash drive from a different company. I really liked my last SanDisk drive too…
The fixed disk drive is to meet Microsoft’s Windows 8 Windows to Go feature/function.
Good news: SanDisk no longer makes such fixed drives.
Bad news: Vendors that bought them are still selling them, and it’s not easy to tell which are fixed and which are removable.
There is a thread here somewhere that discusses a way to circumvent the problem your having but I don’t have time to find it for you. I believe it was during the install process removing the USB drive then reinserting it. And it may have used the RMPrepUSB utility.
Is there such a list of drives that do not include this “feature”? I really do like SanDisk drives, I just need to be able to use them for what I need to do.
