PRIME: re-format the flash drive to recover the operating system

[Harold A Climer]

I have not had to reformat the flash drive(Yet),but some time in the future I will probably do something stupid and have to do this.
I have a couple of questions/comments.
Is the OS actually on the calculator in some kind of compressed format,or do I have to download it to the calculator? I do not know what the cost larger memory would have been to have the OS in a partition similar to what a lot of computers have to hold the backup copy of the OS instead of DVDs or CDs,but it sure would be much easier
Sort of like bank switching on the 48.
It sure would also have been nice to put the OS on a flash drive and be able to plug it into the calculator,or it would have been nice to have an SD card port on it.

[Han]

I think the formatting only formats the user space. To use a PC analogy, it's as if Windows was installed in the D:\ drive, and user documents and files are stored on C:\ so that formatting the calculator does not actually touch the stuff on the D:\ drive, where the OS lives. The end result is formatting resets the calculator back to how you would have received it when you removed it from the box (with any firmware updates intact).

[Michael de Estrada]

Correct. When I reformatted my flash drive, it displayed a message to the effect that the OS was being restored, so it definitely was not being wiped out. Everything I had stored on it was gone and all settings had reverted to their factory defaults. I have not had to reformat it since then, but many resets have been required to clear problems such as frozen phantom images on the display. If you avoid using RPN entry mode with the spreadsheet App, which resulted in a complete keyboard lockup, you will probably not need to reformat the flash drive.