Booting from Flash Drive problem

[chazus]

Curious little problem I came across.

I wanted to put a Win 7 iso on a flash drive to install on a system without a DVD drive. Nothing new there. I attempted to use the Win 7 USB ISO tool, as I normally do, and every time it said that it couldn't format the drive (8gb Patriot).

After much hemming and hawing, I figured the drive might be bad. Strangely, I can still format it just fine (in both FAT32 and NTFS) and it stores data perfectly fine. I grabbed another drive (8gb PNY) and it took the ISO just fine.

In the midst of all this, I got a couple partition manager programs, which is where I discovered the issue.

The flash drive that worked is listed as an "MBR" partition, which I can wipe (Delete partition entirely) and format. The flash drive that does not work was listed as a "Super Floppy" instead of MBR or GPT. I cannot delete any partitions on this drive, only format them.

Furthermore, I bought another drive yesterday (since the Patriot is my gf's, and she didn't want me hogging her drive). Not thinking, I bought another Patriot, since it was the cheapest one there, only to find that it ALSO is this "Super Floppy" format, that cannot take ISOs.

Is this something hard coded into Patriot's drives, or can I change it somehow? EaseUS and PartitionMagic were both unable to change the setup of the boot sector.

[Surfd]

Ran into a potentially related problem a while back, where I got my hands on some old USB sticks from work, which were listed as being 16 gig sticks, but only showed up as being 4 or 8 gig when I plugged them in to my system. Turns out, they had been partitioned to be smaller then they could be (no idea why), and for some odd reason, windows absolutely would not let me modify them. I ended up using the command line disk partition manager to completely nuke them and re-format them to max capacity.

check this link for a decent step by step on how to get it done:
http://www.doztech.net/howto/format-...with-diskpart/

You might need to play around a bit with which type of partition / volume you want to create on the drive to use it as a bootable disk. But Diskpart should give you all the tools you need.

[Deleted]

That is kinda strange indeed. Whenever have something to pation, shrink etc. I've always used MiniTool Partition Wizard and it usually solves problems I can't seem to fix otherwise, it's free so that's a bonus

[Deleted]

Unless I'm totally lost, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/954457, should shed some light into the matter. Anyway it means the USB stick does not have a MBR sector = super floppy, and FAT32 (used in USB) doesn't support booting without a MBR sector. DISKPART should help on the matter as mentioned.

[chazus]

It appears MiniTool worked (I havene't had a chance to try diskpart yet).

Strangely, MiniTool didn't even recognize the different boot sector format, however using the "Convert from MBR to GPT" function, and then using the "Convert GPT to MBR" function seemed to change it back to a 'normal' flash drive that can have ISO's installed. I haven't tested it yet, but EaseUS seems to recognize it the same as other drives.

EDIT: Nope. Now that both drives are MBR format (I have 3 other drives that are MBR, and they take ISOs just fine), I still cannot image an ISO onto either of the Patriot drives.

[Deleted]

Yeah I don't know anything about how it works but always seems to get the job done, some nice free gems out there once in awhile

Glad you got it to work (hopefully).

[chazus]

Newp. Even tried GPT to get them to work. Whatever Patriot does to manufacture or the firmware used, I can't seem to get an ISO to stick. Oh well, it's not like they aren't $6.

[Deleted]

Hmm.. on the other hand would think the Windows 7 USB/DVD download tool(or other tool) that extracts the ISO would create needed partitioning schemes etc.

Could try http://social.technet.microsoft.com/...usb-drive.aspx quide to clean the USB flash drive.