Why is windows so rubbish at disk management?

[charlesr]

I have a USB stick that won't format in windows, even using diskpart on a command prompt.
In Linux, I can manipulate it fine and format it no problem.

Stupid windows. /rant

[wod]

Why is windows so rubbish at disk management?

Does it not show up in disk management ?

I had an issue recently when i fitted a new hard disc in my pc, was a faff getting it seen and formatted.

[charlesr]

It was a usb stick rejigged as a bootable USB drive. Disk management notices it but any attempt to modify it either fails or crashes disk management. Diskpart which is normally the best thing for this stuff on windows just shrugs and says it can't do anything with it.

I put it on a Linux VM and the linux disk utility went "yep, format that as fat32 for you no problemo"....

[originalbadboy]

Diskpart should be able to deal with it as long as its being seen by Windows properly.

If you 'list disk' in diskpart does it even show up in the list? If so then 'sel disk #' and then 'clean'.

[charlesr]

yeah, it showed up fine in Diskpart but refused to clean or format. I could set an mbr, but that's about it.

[originalbadboy]

That's strange ... Can't see why that would be the case, short of there being a problem with the USB stick itself, I have had ones that won't format because they are duff.

You could try listnig partitions and deleting them one by one, otherwise it sounds like a duff USB to me, Windows isn't that crap!

[Brad]

I've had USB sticks in weird formats that Windows simply won't touch, whereas Linux or a Mac will format the crap out of that thing.

[charlesr]

Now that I've reformatted in Linux, it works fine in windows. It just wouldn't play ball beforehand in windows no matter what I tried.

[smouty]

Perhaps it was formatted in a non-standard way... for Windows anyway.
I wouldn't say Windows disk management is rubbish as I've never had an issue ever with disk formats on supported file systems. Microsoft did design FAT32 and it has been adopted by Linux, OSX etc for cross platform compatibility.

[Brad]

The core tools provided by Windows don't seem to go low level enough for dealing with some of the more unusual formats basically. I'm sure there are third party tools to handle it though.

[randombs]

I have a USB hard drive with FAT32 and NTFS partitions on it. I wanted to resize the NTFS partition but couldn't in Windows XP as it doesn't let you. I tried GParted in Linux and it asked if the drive had MBR or GPT and that it's asking because maybe whichever OS or program made the drive could've done something funky. Strange, because I don't format USB drives as GPT, ever. Whichever option I chose it'd show up as completely blank so in my case it's the opposite - Windows is fine with it but Linux says 'no!'

On a side note, recently I plugged a 1TB usb hard drive into the company's CCTV recorder as they wanted to do a backup. CCTV recorder got stuck formatting it and, after that, it'd crash whichever Windows machine I plugged it into(XP and W7). I had to boot into Linux and use GParted to get it back working again.