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USB thumbdrive on Mac doesnt work on PC?

Jayhawk85

Jayhawk85

macrumors member
Original poster
I have a SanDisk 2gig flash drive which I have been using to move files between my work PC and my personal Macbook. It worked on both just fine until I upgraded the Macbook to Leopard. As far as I can guess that is the only thing different in the setup, and now if I use the flash drive on the Mac and then plug it into the PC it tells me the drive needs to be formatted. And the same vice versa. If I format it and put files from the PC on it and then plug it into the Mac now the Mac wants to format it.

What's the deal? Is there a setting so I can use the drive on both computers? That is the point of having portable storage, and I know it worked in the past. I'd appreciate any help I can get. Thanks.
 
What is it formatted too? Only FAT32 is compatible with both Windows and Mac. Disk Utility should be able to do this (it might be called ms-dos format).
 
Using either one, make sure it is formatting using FAT32. If its NTFS (Windows), OSX wont be able to read it as far as I know. And if its HFS+ (is this even possible on a flash disk?) (OSX), windows will not have a hope of reading it.
 
Thanks

I'll try the FAT32 solution and find out at home tonight if it works. Thanks for the tip.
 
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