Making a flash drive to a hard drive

Question

I've found a tutorial here on how to trick the operating system to see a flash drive as a hard drive.

But I have a few questions:

This trick will only work on the os wherein you updated the flash drive driver. Is there a trick that will work like this one, but if you plug in the flash drive to another computer it will still be treated as hard drive?
How do I convert it back to a flash drive?

Why would you want to? surely at the end of the day your just putting data on a stick — admintech, May 19 '10 at 09:46
yup but its easier to partition the flash drive its treated as hard drive. — Wern Ancheta, May 19 '10 at 22:41
I have a program that refuses to be installed in a flash drive! — david, Feb 18 '17 at 20:29

score 4 · Accepted Answer · edited Oct 02 '12 at 18:34

You can partition a flash drive using diskpart. For more information read the TechNet Diskpart Documentation

Example:

Run command prompt "As Administrator"

Run these commands in this order at the command prompt and replace # with your flash drives Disk # listed when you run list disk

diskpart
list disk
select disk #
clean
create partition primary size=1000
select partition 1
active
format fs=NTFS
assign
exit

score 3 · Answer 2 · edited Jun 12 '20 at 13:48

3

If/when you find Diskpart to be insufficient or useless, you will find joy using RMPrepUSB - it's a free utility from the geniuses at reboot.pro.

Check this screenshot for an example:

By adding a small, hidden second partition to the drive, some BIOSes will treat the drive as a hard disk and not a removable drive

edited Jun 12 '20 at 13:48

Community

1

answered Oct 02 '12 at 16:30

Sam Dunlap

31
1

I couldn't get this working. – Alex K Jul 27 '20 at 14:35

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 16 '13 at 22:13

The driver solution provided by OP is for 32 bit and won't work for the 64bit OS. One can also looks for USB with Lexar based firmware and used this tool. The tool will flip Removable Media Bit(RMB) setting of a USB drive. Corsair, a well known vendor, does not support this. See the thread.

Making a flash drive to a hard drive

3 Answers3