Unable to read FAT32 formatted drive in Windows 10

My Dell XPS13 notebook will not read any FAT32 formatted drive, be it a USB flash drive or the bootable UEFI partition.

This is preventing me from:

1. Updating Windows 10
2. Entering Safe Mode
3. Reading any FAT32 drive
4. Re-installing windows

I've tried both UEFI (Secure Boot) and Legacy boot.

The screenshot below shows a known good 4GB, properly formatted FAT32 USB stick. EaseUS Partition Master recognizes as FAT32, Windows 10 Disk Management sees it as RAW.Partition Master however cannot read the disk contents. If I try to re-format the drive (or smaller drives) to FAT32, it fails.

Please !!! This computer will not read any FAT32 drive, USB, internal or external. The drives I try are all correctly formatted, and readable. I plug in a known, good drive, and the computer reports that it needs to be formatted. Trying to reformat to NTFS works fine, but a format to FAT32 fails, and the machine wants to format it again... etc etc.

I cannot re-install windows: because, All Windows 7/8/8.1/10 installation ISO files are designed to be extracted to FAT32.

Seems like a driver problem, but i dont know where the FAT32 drivers are ? Does anyone know?

Solution 1:

It is possible that your windows might not be assigning letters to the drives properly. You should open run (windows + R), and then type 'diskmgmt.msc'. If you can view your drive there, just simply assign a letter to drive by right clicking on the partition of your usb drive and assigning it a letter.

Solution 2:

All Windows versions recognize FAT32, so it's likely its partition was created, but never formatted, else an error occurred during formatting or the drive is failing.

• How is Windows able to boot if it doesn't recognize the EFI partition?
  (Disk Manager shows the EFI partition is recognized... it's partition 1 on disk 0)

Try formatting the USB Drive via DiskPart:

1. WinKey+R
2. Open: DiskPart
   1. lis dis
      • Ensure USB drive is Disk 1, else update #2 accordingly
   2. sel dis 1
   3. clean
   4. convert mbr
   5. cre par pri offset=1024
   6. format fs=fat32 Label=BUSBI
   7. assign letter=D

If this results with the drive still not having its filesystem recognized by Windows, the USB drive has a hardware issue and should be replaced.