Trying to find a flash drive that can be seen by a computer as a “fixed disk” instead of removable so I can format it to be used with the OSD Offline system I’ve had success using an external hard drive but we would like the ability to supply our techs with a flash drive to accomplish the same thing. Any idea what model or brand would be able to do this? I’ve tried using some tools to “flip the removable bit” on a flash drive to make it seen as a fixed disk but had not luck…
Hi, unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge the flash drive producers have stopped creating flash drives that are seen as “fixed disk”.
This, together with the fact that Microsoft does not allow multiple partitions on a a removable disk, and that it requires a FAT32 partition for a UEFI boots, is posing a problem.
Currently, the only suggestion we can give, is to use a USB hard disk drive (as opposed to a flash pen drive) for performing the offline deployment.
Please note that this limitation is only applicable for UEFI deployments (for BIOS, you can create a single NTFS partition), and if the OS image is larger than 4GB (otherwise, you can create a single FAT32 partition).
Thanks
Thanks for the update, I was starting to reach that conclusion from what i was reading online.
I tried formatting my 16gig flash drive as NTFS and running the “makeusb.cmd” to a single drive letter and i was able to start imaging but had errors, the “litetouch” portion wasn’t found which i’m assuming it was looking for on a 2nd partition…
I decided to try a little work around to this issue, i used a 1gig flash drive formatted as fat32 and a 16gig flash drive with NTFS and ran the “makeusb.cmd F G” like normal even though they are physically 2 different drives and it worked!
I was able to image a computer by booting from the 1gig drive and it found what it needed from the 16gig drive during the imaging processs…
Ultimately i’ll probably buy some small external hard drives for our techs instead of having to have 2 flash drives but this seems to work for now 
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I wasted a lot of time on this same issue, and tried a lot of crappy/shady software to try to flip that bit around… ha.
I didn’t think to try a second drive like you did. that’s clever.
my fix ended up being to generate offline deployment media to create the usb drive manually, and to ignore the formatusb script entirely. I just situated a single ntfs partition on the drive and ran the makeusb script. it seemed to work just fine. I ran into another issue where the folder I had the deployment media saved in had a space in the name and it failed because of that (with no error message eluding to that), so be sure to avoid that 