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USB drive headache, formatted in mac and now not working

B

bpcrally

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 3, 2009
9
0
Hello,

I bought a 16gb usb flash drive about a week ago so i could use it for movies on my ps3. It was all working great however I noticed that after I used it in the ps3, I could no longer load videos on it (they would go on, they just wouldnt work)..

So since this was a new drive I figured maybe i just needed to format it. I used the disk utility but i cant remember which setting i used to erase it. Once I erased it I successfully put a video on and put it into my ps3 to try.

The ps3 couldnt see the usb drive anymore. so I put it back into the mac. and now the mac wont see it anymore.

I tried putting it into a pc with vista, it recognized it but wouldnt let me format it or open it.

Any suggestions? :(
 
I'm guessing the PS3 doesn't cope with HFS+ (Mac formatting), which is why it won't see it on the PS3. And I'm also guessing that when you couldn't write to it, it was formatted as NTFS (maybe?), which the Mac can't natively write to (try using MacFUSE to get around that).

Does it show up as a USB device in the System Profiler when you plug it into the Mac?
 
Of course the PS3 being made by Sony and not Mac it isn't going to recognise the exclusively Mac HFS+ format.

You need to use a universal format such as FAT32.

Windows, Mac and most other devices can read FAT32.
 
But the thing is it was working for the past week.. i was loading videos onto it and watching them on my ps3 without an issue..

Now my problem is that the mac wont see it at all.. the only system that saw it was our pc with vista, and it wouldnt let me access it or format it. it just said windows cannot format this drive.

so when i open finder its not there, when i open disk utility its not there.. gah this was just working last night :(

*Edit* and no its not showing up in the system profiler :(

When i first plug it in it lights up and stuff.. but nothing on the mac :(
 
kastenbrust said:
Windows, Mac and most other devices can read FAT32.
Click to expand...
Agreed, but be mindful that there's a 4GB limit on single file size, which might be a problem for movies.

bpcrally said:
so when i open finder its not there, when i open disk utility its not there.. gah this was just working last night :(
Click to expand...

Check the System Profiler. Does it show up as a USB device there? Have you rebooted?
 
I just tried rebooting.. under USB High-Speed BUS its showing a "Flash Disk" now...

the usb stick lights up for probably about 7 seconds and then shuts off...
 
Try putting it in a Windows machine and formatting it as Fat32, the only thing i can imagine has happened is the PS3 formatted it as NTFS for whatever reason, or some other exotic format (which is highly unlikely) failing that you broke it.
 
Well then that opens a whole new can of worms.. I put it in the PC and it installs something on it.. i use the device manager and it comes up and shows its 16gb unallocated. I tried formatting and it just wont go.. keeps coming up with errors..

The problem is i got it off ebay, so this is going to be a lengthy replacement process :(

maybe ill have to find some windows software that will allow me to first aid it?
 
bpcrally said:
Well then that opens a whole new can of worms.. I put it in the PC and it installs something on it.. i use the device manager and it comes up and shows its 16gb unallocated. I tried formatting and it just wont go.. keeps coming up with errors..

The problem is i got it off ebay, so this is going to be a lengthy replacement process :(

maybe ill have to find some windows software that will allow me to first aid it?
Click to expand...

Sounds like you bought a dodgy stick, it tries installing something on it? What make and manufacturer is it? It shouldn't be installing anthing on the stick. Plug it in, right click on its icon in My Computer, and press Format, then choose FAT32 and dont choose any options, then press ok. Tell me exactly what happens after that.
 
it says "windows was unable to complete the format"

right now im trying some recovery software, and it came up with bad sectors?
 
Likely a messed up partition table. "Formatiing" only creates a file system inside a partition. Your best bet is to just wipe the partition table and start over. If you can't get Disk Utility to partition the drive then try zeroing the drive with "dd" from the terminal.

FAT32 is the "lowest common denominator" file system. It is what's used by (almost) all flash drives.

right now im trying some recovery software, and it came up with bad sectors?
Click to expand...

Oh, broken drive. That explains the problem. All is not lost. There is software thast can put all those bad sectors inside a "bad sector file" Just never delete that file or those bad sectors will go back into the free space.

But for that to work thos bad sectors must be fixed and remain the same if the whole drive is failing you will get bad sectors but they will move around randomly.
 
ChrisA said:
. If you can't get Disk Utility to partition the drive then try zeroing the drive with "dd" from the terminal.
Click to expand...

How do i do this?

And Right now its doing a usb pen drive repair thing.. ill see how the outcome is.. its going very slow
 
Not it didnt work :( sigh.. i cant even open it.. when i double click on it in vista it just says please insert disk into drive F
 
Hi, I know this is an old thread but I had a similar problem and finally fixed it on my PC. I used the MacDrive demo and formatted it to HFS then used Windows 7 to format it to back to FAT32.


Until I did that, I could not format or use it on Macs or PCs. It originally became corrupted when trying to view it on a Mac while Avid Media Composer was running.
 
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