Can't "restore" flash drives - Windows doesn't see it

[kparal]

In Windows 10, I burned Fedora Workstation Live on to a 64GB flash drive. That worked fine. When I wanted to reformat it back and used "restore" in FMW, the flash drive is not recognized in Windows. It's not visible in file explorer (no drive, no letter), and it can't be fixed even using Disk Management (all actions report errors). Looking at the flash drive on Linux, it has a MBR table with a single 64GB partition using FAT16 filesystem. FAT16 has a maximum limit of 2GB, so I don't even understand how that's possible, and perhaps this is the reason why Windows don't see the drive. The drive needs to be FAT32, NTFS or exFAT.

Windows 10
FMW 4.1.4

[An-dz]

If you don't have a Linux machine available here's how you can "fix" your SD.

1. First download the official SD Formatter from the SD Association
2. Run the SD Formatter tool and click format on the device (it will show a random ID for the device)
3. Open CMD with Admin privileges and call diskpart
4. Execute list disk and check which disk number is your USB
5. Execute select disk #, where you replace # with the number of the disk you checked in the previous command
6. Execute clean
7. Execute create partition primary
8. Execute format fs=fat32 label="ANY_NAME_YOU_LIKE" quick
9. Execute assign and now a drive letter is given to your device and you can use it again

If you don't format with SD Formatter, diskpart will complain about not being able to access the device. Trying to set the readonly attribute through diskpart won't have any effect since the problem is the filesystem used as OP has already stated.

[grulja]

I cannot reproduce. I tried FMW 4.2.1, made a bootable drive with F34 and I was able to restore it afterwards. Closing it now. Please re-open if this issue is still reproducible.

[An-dz]

I confirm it's working with 4.2.1