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USB drive FAT32 formatted in OSX..trouble on Vista

H

harperjones99

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Nov 3, 2009
497
0
If anyone can help fast I am pressed for time. I formatted USB drives in OSX to FAT32 and as long as I use OSX all is well...problem is Vista wouldn't recognize the drives on 3 different laptops. Got back home and it works fine and I verified FAT32 was selected.

Ideas?
 
harperjones99 said:
If anyone can help fast I am pressed for time. I formatted USB drives in OSX to FAT32 and as long as I use OSX all is well...problem is Vista wouldn't recognize the drives on 3 different laptops. Got back home and it works fine and I verified FAT32 was selected.

Ideas?
Click to expand...

Not really... That's very odd. FAT32 should work. How large is the drive? Although I doubt OSX would be able to format it FAT32 if it didn't meet requirements to begin with.
 
ViViDboarder said:
Not really... That's very odd. FAT32 should work. How large is the drive? Although I doubt OSX would be able to format it FAT32 if it didn't meet requirements to begin with.
Click to expand...

They are just 1gb drives with small PDFs on them...not that the content should matter for recognition.
 
harperjones99 said:
They are just 1gb drives with small PDFs on them...not that the content should matter for recognition.
Click to expand...

Yea, that's very odd. It happened with more than one drive??? I was about to suggest trying again. It works for me no problem.

Are you on Leopard or Snow Leopard? Have you checked to see if they are recognized on an XP computer?
 
Old-Wiz pointed me to this thread. I did the steps to change to Master Boot and all is still well on OSX SL but can't test on a Windows machine until tomorrow. But thanks to all for giving me some things to have ready tonight to try then.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/635453/

And no the drives were not partitioned.
 
Are they Crucial sticks? I think that's the brand that has two partitions by default, one with an application/drivers (it shows up with a CD icon in Mac OS X). I know that on my XP machine I can't just plug in a flash drive, XP has to find the drivers and everything. If using another brand it goes through the same process the first time around, and can't just be used instantly.

Is this the same with Vista as well? I've never used Vista for more than 20 minutes so I'm not sure. It wouldn't surprise me, though.

If they are formatted to MBR and MS-DOS with Disk Utility in Mac OS X it will work properly in Windows unless something else is wrong.
 
Lexar not Crucial. The link in my last post talks about Partition Mapping Scheme (apparently even with an unpartitioned drive the settings can be an issue) and how to change it. I hope that is all it was.
 
harperjones99 said:
Lexar not Crucial. The link in my last post talks about Partition Mapping Scheme (apparently even with an unpartitioned drive the settings can be an issue) and how to change it. I hope that is all it was.
Click to expand...

That should be the problem. I had a similar thing using my ext. HD. It was formatted NTFS, but I still couldn't read it in Windows. Turns out it was still using Apple Partition Map. Re-partitioned as MBR and everything is well!

Good luck!

P.S. I guess that an MBR/GUID/Apple Partition Map is always necessary, even if the drive has only one partition..
 
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