Format usb to fat16 driver#
Format usb to fat16 windows#

Legacy BIOS systems can only boot from disks initialized using the MBR layout. Lastly (sorry I split this into three posts!), if you want some technical background on why NTFS has been 'the standard' for years and suddenly disappeared with UEFI, here's the story: Having to temporarily disable Secure Boot is a bit annoying, but I'm willing to deal with it in exchange for having something that works with both UEFI and Legacy systems while maintaining support for files larger than 4GB. Then whenever I want to boot one, I do a cut and paste from the desired subfolder onto the root of the flash drive, boot from my USB drive, and whenever I'm done, I just cut and paste all of that data back into the correct subfolder.

Format usb to fat16 windows#

Windows 7, Windows 8.1, various releases of Windows 10, Macrium Reflect Rescue Media, etc. In there I have separate subfolders for everything I might want to boot, i.e. I have a flash drive set up in the way I've just described, and I actually just keep a folder called 'Boot' on my NTFS partition. At that point, you now have a flash drive that can boot in either Legacy or UEFI mode - but be careful with that, because as you've found, that also increases the risk of accidentally booting in a mode you didn't intend.

In addition to the above, another advantage of using 'MBR for UEFI' rather than GPT is that if you manually mark the NTFS partition as 'active' (bootable) using Diskpart, then the NTFS partition becomes directly bootable for Legacy BIOS systems.

Format usb to fat16 driver#

If the UEFI NTFS driver partition were first, then anyone running a version of Windows earlier than Win10 1703 would only ever see the tiny UEFI driver partition when they connected their flash drive, while the NTFS partition would remain hidden, which obviously isn't ideal.Д«ut once you get it set up, you just tell your system to boot from your flash drive (the boot option might even specify 'Partition 2'), then you'll see a quick UEFI NTFS driver load, and then it will automatically boot to whatever is set up on the NTFS partition. That doesn't work here because the first partition will be the NTFS partition, because of the issue I mentioned earlier of older Windows versions not mounting anything other than the first partition. Also, I recommend using 'MBR for UEFI systems' rather than GPT, because I've noticed that some Dell systems will only boot from the first partition of removable media in UEFI mode when the media uses the GPT layout. However, after you're done booting from the flash drive, you can turn it right back on. The only catch to this approach is that you will have to disable Secure Boot in order to make it work since the UEFI NTFS bootloader is not signed, because Microsoft refuses to sign GPLv3-licensed code. If you're running Win10 1703 or newer, you'll see the second partition if you're running an older version, then you won't because previous versions of Windows will only mount the first partition of USB removable media, but it's there and will be accessible to the BIOS.

The first will be the regular partition, and then the second will be a small FAT16 partition that contains a UEFI NTFS driver. It's a tool meant for creating bootable media, and if you choose to create an MBR or GPT volume for UEFI systems ( not MBR for UEFI-CSM!!), and then also choose NTFS, Rufus will actually create two partitions on the flash drive.

However, take a look at Rufus, which you can find at. It seems to have started disappearing around the time Dell started writing its own BIOS/UEFI firmware rather than relying on a vendor.

NTFS is optional, and SOME Dell laptop models have native support for booting NTFS in UEFI mode, but they are uncommon, and strangely it seems that newer models are losing this capability. The UEFI spec mandates support for FAT(16) and FAT32.