Thank you Windows. Thank you. You wasted half an hour of my precious* time because I thought the flash drive was faulty. This is another reason why you should have a linux system to make sure the flash drive can still flash.
The problem was I had mapped a network drive as E: ( C: the only partition and D: being my dvd drive). Now when the flash drive was plugged in it wanted to take the place of E: and not increment to F: as any sane human being and a pig wearing lipstick would have expected.
I had to blink finally by pushing the network drive to z: and then the flash drive showed up with a smirk on E:.
precious*: Today is the first day of my unpaid Leave of Absence from ThoughtWorks. Working on a business idea that is going to change the world and bring world peace and prosperity.