Anytime I leave the USB Flash Drive plugged in, Windows does see the drive as a Removable Disk (F:), but there's another drive (Local Drive E:) which is an unreadable duplicate. The motherboard in question is an EPoX EP-8RDA3I. The thing with this one is when I turn the PC on with the Flash Drive plugged in, it auto-detects it in the BIOS as a native drive (i.e. bootable and such), thus Windows 98 thinks it's a fixed disk right from the start. I can even access it under pure DOS without drivers, but again unreadable. Under Windows, it just messes with my drive letters and I can't permanently change it to just use one drive letter, like E:, and end it.

When I leave the USB drive unplugged and then plug it in after it starts up, it works just fine. But I don't want to go through the process of unplugging when I'm done, because in some cases I'll forget to unplug it and then turn it on with the drive plugged in without noticing and here I am with the same problem again. It's clunky for my tastes.

I have installed a fresh copy of Windows 98SE and installed ONLY the display and chipset drivers. I've also installed DAEMON Tools for a virtual drive and used my USB Flash Drive in question to load CD images from it. I've also installed the Windows 98SE USB Mass Storage Device Driver. The thing is without said driver, the USB disk does detect just fine as one drive letter as a fixed disk, but again Windows will not read it. The only way I would read files from the Flash Drive is to install the USB Mass Storage Device driver as per usual, only to have two drive letters for just one USB Flash drive show up in My Computer, one unreadable duplicate and the other being the actual drive, that is if I leave the drive plugged in during startup. In any case, that was all I installed on this system so far.

Is there any way I could get Windows 98 to stop treating it as a fixed disk aside from leaving the drive unplugged? All of this may sound complicated, but it's been annoying me since last night.