Can't format USB Stick with NTFS

I just bought a Sandisk 1GB USB flash drive. I cannot get my XP Pro machine to format it NTFS. The only option it gives me is FAT and FAT32. What is going on? Oddly, when I plug in my external HD that is 40GB using the USB interface, XP only offers me a one choice of NTFS. Why is this? Does XP reallly know the difference between a flash drive and an external harddrive?

 

Hello moboking,


I recently installed an external HD - my old C drive. XP Home did give me a choice of formats.

The flash drive comes formated as FAT, and the system knows it's not a HD - none of the regular HD options, behaves like a floppy, what it was designed to replace.

Since greater than 4GB files are moot, don't see the need for NTFS on the flash drive.

Regards - Charles

 

i looked around for a few, didnt come up with any microsoft links. In general, its treating it like a floppy disk, and assumes that you dont have a keychain drive big enough to justify the overhead that NTFS brings to the party.

 

I work in a computer store where we sell a lot of external harddrive USB enclosures and USB flash drives. Therefore, I assemble and format these drives for customers a few times a week. Trust me people, XP, at least the Pro version, knows the difference between an external harddrive and a flash drive even if both devices use the USB interface. Just plug both devices into a WinXP Pro machine and open My Computer and view the drives in Icon mode and you will see that XP classifies the external harddrive as a harddrive and the flash drive as a Removable Device.

Ok, because of this classification, XP will not allow the flash drive to be formatted as NTFS, and only allow NTFS for the external harddrive. I can't say anything about Windows 2000 since I have not used it to format these external storage devices.

Right now, we have in the store a 4GB flash drive. I have not tried to plug it into the computer running XP Pro yet to know if XP would allow it to be formatted NTFS given the large capacity of this thumb drive. That's is one great things about working in a computer store: I get to play with these devices.