USB Flash Drive as an external HDD

Ive been trying to make my 4Gb flash drive appear as an external HDD on windows machines. The idea was to make it easier to partition and easier to boot off of. I've been searching the web for a while but haven't found much that actually worked. One thing said it would flip a bit that would do this, but it simply stopped my computer from seeing the drive. So is there a free way to do this to a flash drive? I won't pay for software that would do this when I could just buy an small(2.5" or less) external HDD from newegg for under $50.

Yes that's how it is recognized now, but I'm trying to make it be recognized as a regular hard drive. I'm thinking this would be impossible without being able to write a custom driver or something. That's obviously not worth trying.
unless of course someone already figured this out and it's easier than i think. i guess i can always just partition it in Linux and stick to distros already setup to boot off of a flash drive.

I'm pretty sure it's possible since my flash drive came partitioned. (U3 drive so it had a small "CD" partition on it.) I'm gonna mess around with it in linux today to see if I can pull anything off... Right now none of my windows machines are even recognizing the drive. It's possible I killed it by reformatting it too many times or something. Oh well, not like a 4Gb drive is worth much today.

Oh well, all the messing I've done seems to have fried the flash drive. I think the best solution would be to get a 1.8" or 2.5" external HDD used somewhere. That way it would still be cheap and shouldn't die so quickly from formatting or running an OS from it. Flash drives should probably just be left to transferring photos and documents.