Unable to read FAT32 formatted drive in Windows 10

Question

My Dell XPS13 notebook will not read any FAT32 formatted drive, be it a USB flash drive or the bootable UEFI partition.

This is preventing me from:

1. Updating Windows 10
2. Entering Safe Mode
3. Reading any FAT32 drive
4. Re-installing windows

I've tried both UEFI (Secure Boot) and Legacy boot.

The screenshot below shows a known good 4GB, properly formatted FAT32 USB stick. EaseUS Partition Master recognizes as FAT32, Windows 10 Disk Management sees it as RAW.Partition Master however cannot read the disk contents. If I try to re-format the drive (or smaller drives) to FAT32, it fails.

Please !!! This computer will not read any FAT32 drive, USB, internal or external. The drives I try are all correctly formatted, and readable. I plug in a known, good drive, and the computer reports that it needs to be formatted. Trying to reformat to NTFS works fine, but a format to FAT32 fails, and the machine wants to format it again... etc etc.

I cannot re-install windows: because, All Windows 7/8/8.1/10 installation ISO files are designed to be extracted to FAT32.

Seems like a driver problem, but i dont know where the FAT32 drivers are ? Does anyone know?

Answer 1

It is possible that your windows might not be assigning letters to the drives properly. You should open run (windows + R), and then type 'diskmgmt.msc'. If you can view your drive there, just simply assign a letter to drive by right clicking on the partition of your usb drive and assigning it a letter.

Answer 2

All Windows versions recognize FAT32, so it's likely its partition was created, but never formatted, else an error occurred during formatting or the drive is failing.

• How is Windows able to boot if it doesn't recognize the EFI partition?
  (Disk Manager shows the EFI partition is recognized... it's partition 1 on disk 0)

Try formatting the USB Drive via DiskPart:

1. WinKey+R
2. Open: DiskPart
   1. lis dis
      • Ensure USB drive is Disk 1, else update #2 accordingly
   2. sel dis 1
   3. clean
   4. convert mbr
   5. cre par pri offset=1024
   6. format fs=fat32 Label=BUSBI
   7. assign letter=D

If this results with the drive still not having its filesystem recognized by Windows, the USB drive has a hardware issue and should be replaced.

Answer 3

For finding the solution quickly, read the bold text.

There are lots of comments and explanations regarding this problem around the internet. However, if none of them work for you, and you already DISMed and SFCed the crap out of your Windows, then this is the answer for you.

You need to make sure that your Windows does not use the wrong support partitions. If you have e.g. more than a single hard drive installed in your computer and you re-installed Windows a couple of times already, then it may happen, that at one point Windows installed its secondary partitions to the wrong drive. So, when you re-install Windows, the new Windows may refer to the wrong partitions and this is exactly what is causing this issue.

If you remove the non-fitting partitions or the entire storage media having the non-fitting partitions, then your Windows 10 will start to recognise all FAT16 and FAT32 storage media, as it should, immediately after a reboot.

You may rest assured, that all the solutions implicating that your Windows "must" be corrupted in such way are simply not correct in your specific case, especially if you are finding this answer as a last resort. This issue can happen without any corruption or similar 3rd party issue -- like e.g. hardware problems or 3rd party drivers -- whatsoever.

To be clear:
Before you manually remove any partitions from your main drive with Windows on it, you should create a full backup of the entire drive!