USB sticks....just odd

[Supersonic]

I was always under the impression that your average, standard USB pen drive / memory stick thing would work on any platform you care to mention, whether it be XP, Win2k, NT, Vista, MacOS, whatever....

Well, I got myself a neat little 4gb stick inside a real pen, nothing new there, but for the life of me, it just wont be seen by anything that isnt running Vista. Just no sign of life -whatsoever- on the Mac, nothing on the USB bus, nothing. Same on an XP and Win2k box, zilch, nothing, zip. Tried it on old and new Macs, nothing. Just my parents new Vista PC box, sickening eh! It saw it fine, first time, files and all...voila...truly sickening!

Is there something about the way the USB stick is made that might make it behave like this?? Am i missing something fundamental here?

 

[waw74]

how is it formated?

To be read (without 3rd party software) on windows and mac (and linux), it should be formatted FAT32 (sometimes just plain FAT). although you will have a 4GB single file size limitation.

don't know why the other windows flavors are having a problem though.

 

[Supersonic]

It was formatted FAT32, but to make sure, I reformatted it in Vista to FAT32 again, just in case.

I can only guess its a device driver thing....didnt know such things existed on the Mac for USB devises, and for it to be invisible...well...???