Windows – Unable to read FAT32 formatted drive in Windows 10

bootbootable-mediafat32windows 10

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.

enter image description here

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?

Best Answer

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.