Hi,
I purchased a recovery USB from Lenovo for my ThinkPad (out of warranty, had to pay). They sent me a Microsoft branded USB stick preloaded with Windows 8. It is formatted as UDF and served its purpose in restoring my ThinkPad. When inserted into a PC it shows as being a DVD rather than a USB drive. Instead of just binning the drive or leaving it in a drawer, I figured I'd just format it and use it as a "normal" USB stick. However, Windows 8.1 turns round and says "Windows can't format this type of disk. Insert a different disk and try again". I have checked if it is read only in the registry and the StorageDevicePolicies>WriteProtect DWORD is set to 0 as well as Diskpart showing it as readonly: no.
I have taken the casing off the USB to see if there was an onboard write protect switch and there isn't but windows says it can't right to it as it is write protected.
I'm stuck as to how to format this drive. Tried using the dd command in Ubuntu, Disk Utility in OS X and command line in Windows (as well as the obligatory Right-Click > Format). I have also resorted to booting in safe mode with a command line and trying to format from there but it says it cannot gain access to the drive. Clearing the attributes in Diskpart says it doesn't work on removable media.
Any suggestions on where I can proceed from here would be most welcome.
Kind Regards,
Mike