No drive letter assigned to USB drive on windows 8.1

Not long before, I executed dd on my USB drive, but later when I needed it. I found it could not be formatted in Windows Disk Management, which said "The system cannot find the file specified." So I had my USB drive formatted on Linux.

now issue occur. Windows 8.1 does not assign a drive letter, making it unable to be accessed in Windows Explorer, and though it is shown in WDM, any operation returned message mentioned above. But there is no problem when on Linux on my machine and on Windows on another machine.

Solution 1:

As we found out through the comments the problem may be solved using Windows' diskpart. Obviously the Linux tools somehow created a MBR and/or partition table Windows couldn't read properly (or had some other issue with).

If you're using these instructions, do so with care! Making mistakes might mean you're losing all data on one more more disks. If you're unsure, let someone else who's more experienced do this!

• Open the start menu and type diskpart. You should get one hit, launch it and confirm the UAC prompt in case you're asked.

• Wait for the console window to show an input cursor (flashing horizontal line behind DISKPART>).

• Type list disk and confirm with Return.

• Locate the disk you'd like to format/reset. Double check you pick the right one. Remember its number (listed under ###) for the next step.

• Now type select disk # where # is replaced with the number from the last step.

• Once again type list disk and the correct disk should be marked with a * in front of it.

• Type clean, confirm if asked and wait for the operation to finish.

• Leave diskpart using exit.

• Windows Explorer should now ask you what to do with the uninitialized/empty disk. If it doesn't, have a look at disk management (open the start menu and run diskmgmt.msc). You should find the uninitialized drive and be able to create new partitions and format them.

Solution 2:

I had exactly the same issue and the Mario's solution did not fix my problem. Additionally to Mario's solution do the following:

• after 'clean' do not leave diskpart using 'exit'
• type 'create partition primary'

This will create primary FAT32 partition (which was not possible from the Disk Manager as described in comment of 'Stanislav Mamontov' to Mario solution). This partition will be recognized, directly mounted and available. Now you can reformat to e.g NTFS if needed.

Solution 3:

Similar issue, Verbatim Store 'n Go, couldn't do anything with it on Windows 10. Windows 7 was able to access it fine. Formatting on the Windows 7 machine did not help. The Disk Management tool in the Computer Management app kept throwing errors (when trying to assign a drive letter it kept throwing a "Cannot find file specified" error). Deleting partitions there and recreating didn't help.

For me Mario's Diskpart Solution kept throwing an error "Access is Denied", with the following in event log: 5@0101000F - Cannot zero sectors on disk \?\PhysicalDrive1. Error code: \?\PhysicalDrive1

Trying a "create primary partition" after "clean" did not work either.

Tried Paragon to wipe the disk and recreate the partition, this "succeeded" but the original problem persisted.

What did work was SD Memory Card Formatter

Perhaps some of these newer USB drives are just SD cards with an adapter? In any case, it's worth it to try SD Memory Card Formatter.