When you are attempting to shut down, or restart your computer, you may be prompted for removable media. Because you cannot always see the prompt, your computer may appear to have stopped responding (hang). This occurs only if the media was formatted with the FAT32 file system.

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When Windows shuts down or restarts, it flushes any modified contents to the disk. As part of the flushing process, the FAT32 file system information in the FAT32 extended boot sector is updated, which is what the computer is trying to write to when it prompts for the media.

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To work around this problem, re-insert the last used media, and then press ENTER to allow the computer to continue.

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This behavior is by design. Windows is not designed to handle removable media that is formatted with the FAT32 file system. This behavior does not occur if the media is formatted with the FAT file system.

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The FAT32 and extended boot sector information is described in the Windows Platform SDK documentation and MSDN Library.

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