I am trying to flash the latest Raspbian image to a microSD card in a USB adapter using the balenaEtcher software on a Windows 10 Pro system on a Lenovo Thinkpad. Raspbian has two partitions, a FAT32 boot partition and an ext4 data partition.
The fine people at Balena helped me discover that Windows (or something) is creating new System Volume Information folder containing IndexerVolumeGuid and WPSettings.dat files on the FAT32 partition. Since these files are not in the image I'm flashing, the image and microSD checksums do not match and the operation is marked as failed.
I have read this question which addresses "How to prevent creation of “System Volume Information” folder in Windows 10 for USB flash drives?" Following those steps did prevent creation of the extraneous directory and files. The downside is that I believe new files on the system drive will no longer be indexed for searching.
Here's the question. On the same computer, and before following the steps in the question linked above, I could flash older versions of Raspbian without the creation of that extraneous directory. So, something in the boot partition of the 2019-09-26 Raspbian is triggering Windows to create that directory and files. I have extracted the boot partition from a version of Raspbian (2019-07-10) that works without the above changes and the one that fails unless the changes are installed. I've compared them with Meld, but but I don't see differences that would trigger Windows' indexer. How can I figure out what it is different about the 2019-09-26 Raspbian and make it stop without going through the steps at the link?