What is Super Floppy?
I use a USB 2 thumb drive on an external computer port.
I used Acronis Disk Director to clean and format it using NTFS and 512 byte clusters.
It appears to be working normally in Windows 7 64-bit SP1 and chkdsk verifies it with no errors.
It's properties appear normal in all the Windows views (Disk Properties, Device Manager, Computer Management console, etc.)
But Acronis Disk Director 11 Home Update 2 (build 11.0.2343) calls this a 'Super Floppy'.
Using DD11 I can browse files, but I don't see a drive letter, nor can I use the disk sector editor on it.
Also Acronis True Image backup does not see it as a disk drive.
I don't understand why Acronis doesn't see it as a normal disk drive like everything else.
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Thanks, the DISPART instructions seemed to work better.
I found out more about 'super floppy' here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/gg463525
When I first got the drive it was FAT32 and have to use NTFS because I want to encrypt some of the data on it. It is a Verbatim "Store 'n' Stay USB Drive". VERY tiny in size but it can hold a lot of data:
http://www.verbatim.com/prod/usb-drives/everyday-usb-drives/netbook-usb…
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I have used this method to repartition and clean my other USB drives. I had occasionally gotten a controller error when I first plugged some of them into a USB port. But they always worked OK and always passed a chkdsk pass.
Now I don't see the controller errors any more and Acronis tools see them.
I don't know why the usual Windows 7 Format command won't do the proper thing... whatever it is that needs to be done...
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I don't know why for sure either, but I think it has more to do with "how" the drive is configured than the formatting. Flash drives can be configured as many different types and sometimes I think they kind of get mixed up. Certainly it seems that way when they can be seen differently or not even seen at all.
Before DISKPART was able to clean flash drives I used Linux, 'dd', and 'fdisk', along with XP to reset my flash drives. It was the only thing that worked to return a screwed up drive back to a functional drive.
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I always set the flash drive properties (Policies) so that one must use the safe removal. That turns on disk cacheing.
I always thought that would make it look more like a disk drive, but maybe that has something to do with it.
Perhaps when it's buffered and formatted, the MBR doesn't get flushed, or something... A missing sync...
Who knows?
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duplicate deleted
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I have an external storage box connected via eSATA. It holds 5 disks; 4 are recognized correctly as had MBR /NTFS drives. The 5th which is formatted the same way is always recognized as "super floppy" and doesn't have the drive, letter, in DD.
Any ideas?
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As I understand it now, 'super floppy' means a removable drive that does not have partitions.
The best way to make sure you always get partitions might be to use DISKPART to manage the drive/volume.
I could be wrong.
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