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USB Drive Help

T

TyShawn

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jul 17, 2010
264
8
A friend of mine asked for a couple files I had on my MAC. So me being the friend I am I said sure. He brought me his USB drive and I copied over the files he needed. Unmounted the drive and thought no more of it. Today he called me saying the drive is asking to be formated on Windows, but all I did was copy a few files over, is there something I can do to fix this issue without him lossing his data on that drive?
 
Have him bring it back over and copy all the conents to your Mac. Then open disk utility and format it as ms-dos. Copy everything back and you should be good to go. His pc should not ask him to format it again.
 
Bryan thank you for that I will follow those instruction, can you or anyone tell me why the change in the drive state took place? The reason I ask is I dont want to mess up anyones drives going forward.
 
I always use fat32 as my format for USB drives to go between mac and pc's without fear reformat requests. I think that is probably why. Your friend's flash drive is NTFS.
 
peapody said:
I always use fat32 as my format for USB drives to go between mac and pc's without fear reformat requests. I think that is probably why. Your friend's flash drive is NTFS.
Click to expand...

Just FYI, selecting the ms-dos format in disk util will put it in fat32.
 
mulo said:
and removing all data on it in the process. FYI.
and FAT32 is not ideal for anything larger then 4GB, as the format is limited to 4GB file size.
Click to expand...

That's why I told him to copy over all of the data and then copy it back after formatting.
 
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