SOT: renaming memory stick

[Scott]

One of my memory sticks keeps coming up as USB Drive (K:) : I tried renaming it as TOSHIBA but the name immediately reverts. I reformatted giving the name as TOSHIBA but it came up as USB Drive (K:). I have also tried as administrator. Any ideas?

[Brian G]

Well have you tried the command line method, I'm sure you can change its name, but if you want it to always be the same drive letter then that is a bit more complex involving giving it a letter above any that might be used and fixing it, but it will only be that letter on the machine, not others machines as its classed as a removable disk. I have to say, giving it a volume label normally sticks as long as you use the safely remove method to make sure it has been actually written to the real stick.

Remember though that some makers of sticks do like a certain prefix, so sometimes there are not enough characters to do what you want so it goes back. Brian

[Paul]

I was surprised at the result, when evaluating my USB stick. It's an 8GB OCZ Rally2 with a single 8GB FAT32 partition.

disktype /dev/sdb

--- /dev/sdb Block device, size 7.469 GiB (8019509248 bytes) DOS/MBR partition map Partition 1: 7.467 GiB (8017412096 bytes, 15659008 sectors from 2048, bootable) Type 0x0B (Win95 FAT32) Windows NTLDR boot loader FAT32 file system (hints score 4 of 5) Volume size 7.452 GiB (8001765376 bytes, 1953556 clusters of 4 KiB)

So it's a FAT32 file system. (That's the Cygwin version of the disktype program, consisting of disktype.exe and two Cygwin runtime DLLs. Notice the Cygwin port, does not use Windows namespace and uses Linux namespace equivalents.)

I was all set to take a victory lap and to my surprise, the Partition Volume Label was set to "No Name". There is a second storage mechanism for a volume name and it's (according to Wikipedia) a "directory volume label". However, the link on the page doesn't seem to point to the right section.

I scanned the USB stick for that label and only one hit. I found the name "STUFF " at 0xFEC000 (~16MB offset and not relevant). It seemed to be the beginning of a FAT (file allocation table). Because a handful of bytes later I can see an attempt at System Volume Information stored there. That's why I'm guessing I've just entered a FAT.

So for some reason, an attempt to write the FAT is failing. Would this be a permissions problem ? I thought FAT didn't have permissions particularly. Only low level device access (reading sectors) requires Administrator elevation. Which is why I elevated my copy of HxD hex editor when scanning the USB stick.

There would be a similar analysis for NTFS-formatted partitions.

I would suspect device failure (can't write the equivalent of my

0xFEC000 address). But that Wikipedia article above is pretty thick and hard to read, and just maybe, there is a set of flags you could mal-adjust, to give the symptoms.

You could try CHKDSK F: or whatever

chkdsk /? # read the help first

chkdsk (options) driveletter: # Then run it

Another possibility is some OS policy has been set to stop that, but who knows what the keyword for that would be.

Summary: I learned it wasn't as simple as it looked. I thought that "No Name" storage area was it. But not on the (properly labeled and functional" small stick I tested.

Paul

[Richard]

Does this work for you?

[Brian Gaff]

One word of warning. Do not use NTFS, since if you ever want that stick to have mp3 audio on it for use witha player, most of the ones I've seen will not play ntfs formatted media, and further will play the tracks in order of entry in the fat, not alphabetically. Brian

[NY]

Yes, few dedicated players (PVR, DVD, MP3, dashcam etc) will accept disks (HDD or memory stick) which are formatted with NTFS. Most, but not all, will accept exFAT, which at least gets round that pesky 4 GB file-size limit of FAT32 - at least as implemented by Windows. But the default filesystem that most devices use is FAT32 - complete with the 4 GB limit whereby a continuous recording gets segmented into 4 GB chunks, often with a slightly glitch between the end of one chunk and the start of the next.

I imagine this is because NTFS is proprietary to Windows, so third-party devices have to pay a licence fee to use it. What intrigues me is that Linux has NTFS drivers that are available for free. Do MS turn a blind eye to this, as long as it if for private use rather than as a product for sale? I presume the Linux implementation is reverse-engineered by examining the disk contents and does not involve any code that is written by MS.

[whisky-dave]

even more important when doing 4K video which on my camera is about 1GB per miniute so I use exFAT on a SD card mosty use SDXC A2 as the SDHC can;t seem to handle the write speed.