I have a old USB drive reformatted several times. Lately I wanted to share some files with some Windows PCs and I reformatted it again. From a Linux PC I created a ms-dos partition table and a single FAT 32 partition. To my surprise no Windows PC could see the drive, when it was plugged nothing happened and upon a brief search no new drive was found. Since I wasn't the owner of the machines I could not start fiddling on them, so I just found another way to share the files, but I still wonder why Windows could not see the drive. At the beginning I wondered if Windows was discontinuing ms-dos partition table support in favour of GPT, but after I brief search I discarded the hypothesis. Another possibility is that Windows didn't have the rigth drivers, however my USB drive might be old, but not so much, it would be going a little bit too far with planned obsolescence. What else could be the problem?
The Windows PCs all seemed to be running Windows 10, but I can't be sure about it.
The partition actually was created twice. The first time using KParted on Debian, the second time using SUSE Partitioner on OpenSUSE 15.2
The disk is a Danelec Z Mate. Here below are the driver details as seen from fdisk.
Disk /dev/sda: 15 GiB, 16039018496 bytes, 31326208 sectors
Disk model: Z Mate 16GB
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x6c484ftc
Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sda1 2048 31326207 31324160 15G c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
UPDATE: By chance I could try the drive on an old PC running on Widows 7 and it worked without any change. So, for the moment I'll assume that there are no issues for the partition table and the partition, but for the usual planned obsolescence Windows 10 does not have the drivers for that USB drive.
