How to Install Windows 7 From USB Drive without Windows 7 ISO DVD. Fix : External USB Hard Disk drive not detecting / not working properly problem in Windows 8, 7, Vista & XP.
Removable USB Flash Drive as Local Disk in Windows 7. In this article, we’ll show you how to make a USB flash drive or an SD card to be identified in the system as a common local hard disk. You may ask why it is necessary. The matter is that by default Windows identifies all the flash drives and memory cards as removable drives that can not be split into several partitions with any of the standard Windows tools. And even if the USB flash drive is split into two or more partitions using third- party utilities (say, in Linux), only the first partition is available in Windows. Windows supports working with multiple partitions only for HDDs identified as local (i.
Windows recognizes a USB flash drives as removable devices due to the presence of a special bit descriptor RMB (removable media bit) on each of the devices. If the system determines that RMB=1 when polling the connected device using Storage. Device. Property, it concludes that this device is a removable drive. Thus, to make a system see a USB flash drive as a hard disk, it’s enough to modify this descriptor.
You can do this directly (which is quite risky because of the differences in the device- specific hardware implementations, and not always possible), or indirectly, by substituting the response of a USB device using a special driver, which allows to filter the information in the response of the device. Connect the USB flash drive to any available port on the computer, then open the Disk Management console (diskmgmt. Removable. Also you can view the type of device in the Volumes tab in the properties of the device (as we see here Type: Removable). Or using the command diskpart: Filter Driver for Hitachi Microdrive Flash Drives. To make a USB flash drive or an SD card to be recognized as a hard drive in the system, you need a special filter driver, which allows you to modify data sent via the system stack of the current device driver. We will use a filter driver for USB flash drives by Hitachi (Hitachi Microdrive driver), which allows to change the USB device type from removable to fixed (USB- ZIP - > USB- HDD) at the OS driver level. Using this driver, you can hide from the system that the connected device is removable.
As a result, the system assumes that it works with a usual hard disk, which can be split into partitions available in the system simultaneously. Hitachi Microdrive Driver Files: You need to download the version of the driver in accordance with the bitness of your system. Both archives have identical structure and consist of two files: cfadisk. Hitachi driver file. The next step is to identify the device ID of your flash drive. To do it, in the properties of the disk on the Details tab in the Device Instance Path setting, select and copy (Ctrl + C) the code for the device instance.
In our example this would be: USBSTOR\Disk& Ven. We need the sections cfadisk! In the code of the device instance, the part after the second “\” should be deleted (we delete 9. ABCDEF& 0 in our example). We get. Find the section . If you want a USB flash drive in the Device Manager to be displayed under a specific name, you have to edit Microdrive.
If Hitachi Microdrive USB driver is installed on a 6. Open the Drivers tab and click Update Driver. Specify the path to the directory to which you have extracted the archive with Hitachi driver you had downloaded earlier. Select the new driver. Ignore the warning of the missing digital signature of the driver. Now you only have to restart the computer and having opened the Disk Manager, verify that the flash drive is identified as a common hard disk (Type: Basic) and uses Hitachi driver. By opening Windows Explorer, you can also make sure that the icon of the flash drive has changed: it is displayed as a common hard drive.
Now this flash drive can be used as a regular HDD: you can create partitions, specify the active partition, create dynamic disks, install software that does not work from USB flash drives, etc. Important. Without this driver, the second partition of the device will not be available on other Windows computers. How to Remove Hitachi Microdrive Driver. To delete Hitachi Microdrive driver, open the properties of the drive and click Update Driver on the Drivers tab. The system will install the native driver.