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Snow Leopard Messed Up My Flash Drive.

U

urowgn

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 9, 2009
18
0
I have a 16gb flash drive that has worked flawlessly until I upgraded to SL. Now, I use the drive between windows and Mac so I've always had to format it using FAT32.

Ever since upgrading to SL, windows computers cannot read the drive anymore after I formatted it. Whenever I put it in a windows machine, it will prompt me to format. When I try to do this it states my capacity is only 200MB.

Now, when I put it back into any mac, it will work. I've tried using a Leopard machine to format but now I still have the same problem.

Any ideas??
 
take all your files and put them on your mac desktop. go to disk utility, erase the flash drive, and reformat it as fat32. then put your files back.
 
I've tried that. I've formatted the drive using many diff. computers and OS. XP, Vista, 7, Leopard, SL.

The problem isn't with the Macs, I can read and write fine in them but once I put it back into a Windows machine, it will prompt me to format. It also thinks the drive is only 200MB.
 
I have the exact same problem with a 16gb sandisk cruzer.

Used disk utility to format it as fat32... Windows Vista won't recognize it and just wants to always format it. Works find in SL.

This flash drive worked fine in any windows machine prior to SL.
 
Great, at least I'm not the only one. Mine's a Kingston Data Traveler 16gb.

Think maybe it has to do with how SL calculates the space? You know, how a 16Gb flash will actually show as 16GB whereas before it would have been 14.XXGB. Maybe it's messing up Windows with that.
 
urowgn said:
Think maybe it has to do with how SL calculates the space? You know, how a 16Gb flash will actually show as 16GB whereas before it would have been 14.XXGB. Maybe it's messing up Windows with that.
Click to expand...
I wouldn't think the formatting "write" routines in SL changed because of this... just how it calculates the space after it's formatted.

Windows does recognize a DVD burned in SL though and reports the size correctly. This is what I have to do until this gets straightened out.
 
Have you tried using the "partition" option in DU to reformat the drive? Or is the drive not set to the Master Boot Record partition table?
 
urowgn said:
Great, at least I'm not the only one. Mine's a Kingston Data Traveler 16gb.

Think maybe it has to do with how SL calculates the space? You know, how a 16Gb flash will actually show as 16GB whereas before it would have been 14.XXGB. Maybe it's messing up Windows with that.
Click to expand...

The Finder is showing the space available in a different way. It's not physically changing anything on the drive in order to do so.
 
Well, I've tried partitioning and Zeroing out the disk. Tried that last night but still no good.

I've also tried formatting for mac (OS Extended Journaled). I did this to see if I could then use windows to format it to NTFS or Fat32 and get my 16gb instead of 200mb but that didn't work either. I thought maybe SL was doing Fat32 wrong or something.

I've basically tried everything a slightly above average user can do. If there are any more advanced ways of doing it, someone let me know. All I could do was try every option in Disk Utility.
 
madog said:
Have you tried using the "partition" option in DU to reformat the drive? Or is the drive not set to the Master Boot Record partition table?
Click to expand...
I have tried it every which way to Sunday in disk utility.

My windows machine isn't here right now. I'm going to try doing this with some 8gb compact flash cards using a card reader and see if only certain sizes are the problem. Can't understand why it would matter though.
 
Yea I was about to give that a shot too. Going to try with a 1gb stick later tonight. Will post the outcome.
 
I've had the same problem. I got SL and my XBOX 360 won't recognize my thumb-stick I use to watch movies ect. I did find that if you use disk utility and click on the "Partition" tab, then choose 1 Partition for "Volume Scheme" then under options just below select "Master Boot Record" and "MS-DOS(FAT)" for format and click "Apply". It works but is much more annoying than the usual Erase that worked in Leopard.
 
Fixed my problem too-----Partitioning and Master Boot Record allows me to move files between Imac and Xbox.
 
Thanks for the fix, it sorted out my 16GB flash drive when I was just about to go insane.

However, an hour later I realise that I cannot copy any kind of file larger than around 220MB... any ideas?
 
Well, I forgot to check this thread. I was just going to post that I figured out how to fix it but I guess you guys already know!!
 
Sorry to dig up an old thread, but I am having this exact problem too.

I did the partitioning/master boot record, and that works, but I still can't copy anything over 220mb.

Anyone remember how they solved it?
 
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