USB Flash Drive showing up as LOCAL DISK

So basically, I just purchased a defective usb flash drive.  The reason I bought it is because I’ve been using a 4gb cruz (my daughter’s) and it’s been working flawlessly to write boot images on.  This one isn’t recognized as a removable disk, so there goes 90% of usb utilities out there.

A sandisk bit flip utility should be in the works.  We are intering the age of solid state hard drives afterall, changing their removable media status makes flash storage more versatile.