Alright this is really weird behavior. I did also notice this before I did the formatting, this is strange. First off, I just had no less than two different Pentium desktops just kick the bucket on me, a P4 and a Pentium D while trying to use their card readers to use Rufus on the card. So then I had to go and haul out a Windows 7 HP, which actually worked with Rufus. I created an MS-DOS boot disk with it.
So, the weird behavior. My 9x laptops are freezing when I plug the drive in, which they weren’t before. Sometimes they’ll freeze for a while and then unfreeze, other times it will stay frozen seemingly, unsure why. In any event when they do unfreeze the drive is detected as before but no mounts again. HOWEVER, I was able to successfully boot my ThinkPad 385XD off of the card with no problems. Hmm. Any 3rd party windows drivers I could try?