Every time I completely wipe a hard drive (eg. fill with 0's) it shows as uninitialized in Windows (ie. no MBR or partitions), which is what I expect.
However, if I do the same with a USB flash drive, it always shows as initialized and has a single RAW partition (which is usually auto-mounted with a drive letter in Windows, even though you get an error if you try to access it, due to it not having a valid file system). When I view the contents of the disk in a hex editor, every byte contains 0's. How can a drive be initialized (ie. have MBR/GPT) and have a RAW partition if every byte is zero ?
I guess this is something to do with the way Windows handles USB flash drives as Mac OS X sees the same drive as uninitialized, but I would like to understand why Windows does this ?
Any ideas what's going on?
