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This concerns an issue with an USB flash drive on Windows 10 - 1703 (occuring on both, Home and Prof)

The USB drive has a DOS partition table, the first (primary) partition is type 07 and formatted as NTFS, the second one is an EFI partition (type ef), the 3rd to 7th are logical partitons of type 83, formatted as ext4.

Until Windows 10-1607, the behaviour was such that the system assigns a drive letter to the first partition (in NTFS) and tries to automount this partition, but ignores the others.

Since Windows 10-1703, this behaviour has changed. The system does not only mount the NTFS partition, but also the EFI partition.

Furthermore, drive letters are assigned to the ext4-partitions as well, and the user is prompted to format these partitions.

Now my question: How can I restore the old behaviour? Windows should only automount the first partition, but ignore the EFI partion and refrain from prompting me to format the ext4 partitions.

Any hints would be appreciated.

With best regards,

damian

P.S.: Globally disabling automount (in diskpart) does not help, since this disables the mounting of the first partition as well...

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  • I've experimented with using partition attributes on a GPT-formatted USB stick, with no success. I had some hope that setting the 0th bit ("platform required") on the ESP would prevent it being assigned a volume GUID and hence auto-mounted, but no. Microsoft documents that bit 62 on a basic data partition means "hidden", and this works: but only for the basic data partition, which I actually do want mounted!
    – wjt
    Oct 23, 2017 at 14:16

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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In Disk management removing the drive letters from the other partitions should do the trick - Windows will (better: should) remember this setting for this USB stick.

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  • Sorry, i forgot to tell: this is what I am presently doing, actually. Yet, this only works on one particular machine with one particular usb stick. I would prefer a solution which restores the old default behaviour for any usb stick and can be easily applied to any machine, e.g., via group policy (or reg hack for W10-home). But regardless, thanks for the help.
    – damian
    Sep 30, 2017 at 11:38

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