One for anyone good with Windows 7!

Another non-bike related post..

My fiances laptop has stopped reading some USB drives and other devices. I ran a virus scan on both Avast and Windows defender and both freeze on 'fastfat.sys' which after looking up, is the driver which allows reading / writing of FAT based devices.

Problem is, now I know what's wrong, how do I rectify it? Can I try and copy that specific driver from the Windows 7 disk? I don't want to do anything risky as her laptop has years of research for her PhD on it...

Backup whatever you can before you try anything, insert the win 7 disc and see if it will auto repair the problem. Might sort it for you.

Linux

Originally Posted by BigBaddad

Linux

So he has one question with windows and you suggest Linux where he will have 100s of questions? Good one.

I agree with Electro's fix. However a recommendation for the future I would suggest ensuring all of your USB pen drives are formatted with NTFS, it is a much more resilient partition structure than FAT32.

Ok, just found a solution on the microsoft website, apparently this happens when you swap the drive between XP / Vista / Windows 7 machines. I just formatted the drive (to NTFS, thanks ravingdavis) on my PC (also win7) and now it works on her laptop. Job jobbed!

[SoulKiss]

Originally Posted by ravingdavis

So he has one question with windows and you suggest Linux where he will have 100s of questions? Good one.

I agree with Electro's fix. However a recommendation for the future I would suggest ensuring all of your USB pen drives are formatted with NTFS, it is a much more resilient partition structure than FAT32.

Only issue is it renders them useless on non-NTFS based drives.

Which now include Android devices with USB-Host support, or Mac's.

There is a good reason why most manufacturers still use FAT.

Seems my fix was only temporary.

It still wont recognise nearly any other USB device (principally memory sticks). This is definitely something to do with fastfat.sys as windows freezes whenever it gets to it on a virus scan and if I locate it in windows explorer, as soon as I right click it, explorer stops responding...