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"Disk not formatted" error on Fat32 drives (Windows XP)

4K views 10 replies 4 participants last post by  nawaf 
#1 ·
I have an Acer Laptop and I am unable to open any USB flash drive or hard disk with a FAT32 file system. I get a "Disk is not formatted, do you want to format it now?" error. When i do try to format it says "Windows was unable to format the drive". The same devices work fine on other computers. Booting in Safe Mode does not help. I have an external USB hard drive with two partitions one of which is NTFS and the other is FAT32. The NTFS partition works fine in my system while the FAT32 partition gives the same error. The problem apparently started after I had to to a 'chkdsk /r' and a 'fixboot' command via the Recovery Console because my system was stuck in a BSOD reboot loop (Unmountable Boot Volume). Since my CD/DVD drive does not work properly I had to create a bootable USB thumb drive with the Recovery Console to do that. The computer works fine now save for this USB problem. Extremely frustrated since i cannot transfer any of my files to or from my computer because USB was the only option i had after my DVD Drive failure.

Any help greatly appreciated. Thanks.
 
#6 ·
Have you used any tools on the registry lately?

I'm sure that the drive appears in Disk Management, but you still will be unable to access it.

Download the attached file. Unzip it and right-click the reg file inside. Choose "Merge" to add it to your registry. Try a drive. If it does not work, try rebooting.
 

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#7 ·
Yes, a drive letter is assigned both in My Computer and Disk Management, where it shows the drive status as Healthy. I tried to add your attached file to the registry but I get this error, "Cannot import C:/....fat32.reg: Error accessing the registry". And no I haven't used any registry tools recently. I have CCleaner installed but I haven't used it for the past few months.
 
#8 ·
Try the attached, reduced version.

If you use Ccleaner, don't use its registry cleaner, or any other.

Have you ever connected FAT32 drives to this machine before? If you have, and you have any idea when the problem first arose, you could try System Restore. But if you have no idea, then that would probably not be of much use.
 

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#9 ·
I merged this version but the problem persists. And yes, FAT32 drives worked fine before the BSOD problem i mentioned in my original post. I already tried using System Restore multiple times with multiple restore points but it failed to restore the system every time.
 
#10 ·
Do you have any problem devices in Device Manager? Have you changes the status of any services?

Download this DriverManager. Install it. Make sure that you have not used a FAT32 device in this session. If you have, reboot.

Then, start the Driver Manager. Scroll down to fastfat.sys. The status should be "Stopped". Highlight it and click the "Properties" button to see if it mentions any problems in particular. It should be set to "Manual" or "Automatic". If it is not, change it. Then close that dialog, but not the program.

Insert a FAT32 device. After the sound and waiting a few seconds for the device to be installed, click the "Refresh" button in the Device Manager. Does the driver change from "Stopped" to "Running"?

(I'm adding yet another version of that reg file. I'm not sure, but I think I may have removed too much in trying to get it to merge last time.)

Also, I hope that you are not trying to access a second partition on a flash drive because Windows cannot do that.

You may also want to try some recovery software to get your files from that drive so that you can repartition the drive. Recuva is a good one to start with.
 

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#11 ·
The status remains "Stopped" even after doing what you said. Tried the reg file and again it didn't work. And no there aren't any problem devices in Device Manager. As for the services, I had modified services.msc according to Blackviper's service configuration about a year back. Also, I don't need to use any recovery software since i can easily access my files on the external USB drive or any other flash drive via another computer. Could it be a virus or something? I'm considering a clean re-format and re-install of Windows XP if nothing else works. Thanks for all the help mate. Appreciate it.
 
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