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Every time I completely wipe a hard drive (eg. fill with 0's) it shows as uninitialized in Windows (ie. no MBR or partitions), which is what I expect.

However, if I do the same with a USB flash drive, it always shows as initialized and has a single RAW partition (which is usually auto-mounted with a drive letter in Windows, even though you get an error if you try to access it, due to it not having a valid file system). When I view the contents of the disk in a hex editor, every byte contains 0's. How can a drive be initialized (ie. have MBR/GPT) and have a RAW partition if every byte is zero ?

I guess this is something to do with the way Windows handles USB flash drives as Mac OS X sees the same drive as uninitialized, but I would like to understand why Windows does this ?

Any ideas what's going on?

DarkMatter
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  • I guess it has something to do with *removable bit* that is reported by a device and usually cannot be changed. Windows treats removable and fixed devices differently. Some removable drives may report as fixed and then it gets funny: compare [this](http://superuser.com/q/76707/432690) and [this](http://superuser.com/q/1076433/432690), also [this Google search](https://www.google.pl/search?q=flip+removable+bit). I believe Windows (at least Win 7) cannot handle multiple partitions on removable drive, while Linux doesn't care. Your experience may be the next Windows oddity in this subject. – Kamil Maciorowski Feb 28 '17 at 08:19

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