Hi,

I have an external hard drive that plugs in through usb. A few months ago I redid the filesystem a few times (tried to install a liveUSB distro, among others) using different machines (linux, windows, mac). In the end, I had a single partition with an empty vfat filesystem on it (which is pretty much how it came when I bougt it).

However, the drive is no longer recognized as 'removable' by windows or mac or linux (pmount says it's not removable). I'm wondering how to make the hard drive recognized as removable media once again. There seems to be a 'removable' flag that can be toggled:
Notice the line that says How do I go about and chage this file to read '1'? This has to do with the hardare: it is not recognized as removable on ms-windows either. Is there any software that can do low-level stuff like this?

Maybe using fdisk in expert mode can take care of it. Just type fdisk [device] into your terminal, then m to see the various options. if you don't see anything relevant, you can choose x for expert mode.

I don't find anything relevant in fdisk.

My USB drive also shows up with "0" for that flag. The only things in my system that show "removable" are the optical drives and the compact flash reader. I don't think this a flag you can toggle---it seems to be a property of the hardware that gets detected when it is connected/turned on.

Yeah, this topic is never mentionned anywhere... maybe it's impossible? But, when I first bought the hard drive, it was recognized as removable. It's only after making a new filesystem (using Windows, I think - I really don't remember how I did this, it was many months ago) that the drive was no longer recognized removable.

I'm asking for support directly from the company, see if they can come up with anything... (maybe they'll give me a new hard drive ? )

Which is what led me to the whole fdisk idea. If the disk was removable at first and became un-removable only later, then clearly this involves some information bit on the disk that can be toggled on or off in the MBR. Anyway, since the damage was caused by Windows, I'm not sure whether a solution can be found using Linux fdisk. Btw, what happens if you go into Windows, disconnect the drive using the "remove safely" thing and plug it in again?

Windows assigns the removable flag to the drive letter, not the media mounted there. So if you swap drives or change the boot order in BIOS this sometimes happens.

Try deleting the device in Device Manager and rebooting.

I think jay73 is on the better track for this one: I plugged it into a computer it had never touched before and it was treated as an internal hard drive there too. But I don't think fdisk can do anything about this, unless it has features that are not documented in the man page (I litterally RTFM on this one!)

What if you go into windows device manager, right click and select Properties? Can you switch to removable? This option existed on Windows 98 but I'm not sure whether it still does on XP. If nothing helps, you may want to look on the site of the manufacturer whether they have a zero-filling tool available for download.

Well, my 3.5" card reader, for example, was detected as an internal drive by XP until I updated the driver. Then it showed up as a removable drive. There's no Vista driver for it, so now that I've upgraded it's showing up as internal again. The flash card I use doesn't matter.

If you have another external enclosure that's working right just swap the drives and see what happens. If it suddenly shows up as removable again you can eliminate the drive as a possibility and focus on the driver, as I originally suggested.

Or you could just use dd if=/dev/zero