1 Topic by TKinami

  • TKinami
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  • Registered: 2016-03-08
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Topic: USB drives formatted by GParted can't mount in Windows

I have two USB drives that I previously used as Linux installation media.
I formatted both using GParted in Linux (deleting the old partition, creating a new partition). The same problem exists whether they're formatted as FAT or NTFS.
Both work fine on Linux computers--they can be mounted, and I can copy files to or from them.
But I've tried them both on two Windows 10 machines and neither one can be mounted. They can be viewed in the Computer Manager, but can't be assigned a drive letter, and I can't read or write to them.

When I use Diskpart from the command line, I can select the drive and create a partition, but when I try to clean or format it I get the message "The system cannot find the file specified".

How can I get these working on Windows again?

Please forgive my ignorance--I'm not an IT person, and I'd never even known about Diskpart before trying to solve this problem.
Thanks in advance for any ideas!

2 Reply by gedakc

  • gedakc
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  • Registered: 2007-11-30
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Re: USB drives formatted by GParted can't mount in Windows

By default Windows is usually set to only recognize a single partition on a USB flash drive.

You might try an Internet search to learn what might be required to use multiple partitions.  If I recall I think the USB drive must have a bit set to indicate to Windows that it is a hard drive.

Otherwise you could reformat the USB drive with only a single partition.