USB Flash Drives & Snow Leopard

I'm having the same problem. I use my 8GB USB Flash drive to play movies on my DVD Player. I formatted it and the DVD Player recognizes it and plays movies perfectly. But on my Windows Laptop, it shows as 200MB. Tried erasing & reformatting it couple of times, same problem. Just for the heck of it, installed Tiger on a separate partition and erased & formatted the drive under Tiger. Works perfectly fine on both my DVD Player & Windows Laptop.

Is the FAT format somehow broken under SL, 'coz it works fine under Tiger & my earlier Leopard installation.

This is my first post to this forum, since I haven't seen this issue resolved anywhere else.....

I'm having a similar issue with a 1GB usb flash drive as well. With Leopard, it was painless to add music to the drive and plug it into my car's usb port. After I upgraded to Snow Leopard, the disk utility recognizes the drive and shows that memory is being used, but it shows "0" under the Number of Files. Now, the flash drive won't play in my car. Anyone have any ideas on what's happening here?

Can't stand listening to terrestrial radio and most of my music is archived on a hard drive. Guess I'll have to burn some CDs in the mean time, eh?

Same problem here. 4gb drive. Worked fine before I reformatted with the Mac. Now windows only recognizes it as 200mb, while the Mac sees two partitions. One approx 3.8gb and the 200mb one. Windows can only access and will only format the 200mb partition. I didn't specify any partitions when I reformatted.

I've noticed numerous postings on this issue by googling it, so it isn't isolated. Everyone seems to get the 200mb partition which Windows can access.

Its weird. I want to use the full 4gb to move stuff between the Mac and PC, but the Mac no likey.

Was having the same issue myself, formatted to MS DOS (FAT 32), using disk utility, then only 200MB out of 8GB available in Windows. Managed to solve it after unsuccessfully trying Windows Disk Management and Ubuntu Gparted.

Go back to disk utility, select the USB drive, the root rather than partitions. Then instead of Erase go to Partitions instead. Set it to create 1 partition, it will then give you the option of how you want to format the drive.

I have MacFuse and NTFS-3G installed so chose NTFS, not an option in erase. Formatted perfectly as 8GB. Then went into Windows and is now working fine, used Windows to format back to FAT 32 and it's back to normal.

Hope this works for you guys.

I tried setting the flash drive to 1 partition like you suggested and it looked like everything went fine until I tried to play the mp3s in my car again. Same issue. It's not recognizing the files. I burned them onto a cd and they played fine. Still not sure what's going on here as everything worked great until I upgraded to SL. Thanks for the tip, though! Maybe 10.6.2 will address this.

Select the drive in Disk Utility (all the way at the left, not the volume indented beneath it), and click the "Partition" tab. Set "Volume Scheme" to "1 Partition". Click the "Options" button and select "Master Boot Record" and click "OK". Set "Format" to "MS-DOS (FAT)". Set a "Name" and click "Apply".

That did the trick! Selecting the Master Boot Record radio button was all that was missing. Malcolm, you are a gentleman and a scholar. Thank you for your assistance. My sanity has been restored!

Cheers,

-Mike

Thanks so much, Malcolm, for sharing the solution to this vexing problem. And just in time: I'd formatted a 4 gig Sony USB drive using Snow Leopard to move files to someone else's PC and got the two partitions, was able to solve that by reformatting, selecting the device and specifying one partition. But when I took it to a FedEx office tonight to print an important document, their PCs thought the drive was blank. I'm so glad you posted, since I have to get this done tonight and would never have found the additional formatting options where they were hidden. This—the one PC-friendly drive format being disabled from actually working on PCs by default—looks to be a flaw with Disk Utility, and a huge one at that, so with luck a fix won't have to wait for another maintenance release of Snow Leopard. Apart from this experience (and what may be the related problem of now being able to mount and read from but not write to some PC-using friends' USB drives and larger portable hard drives), I'm loving the new OS.

not being able to mount and read from but not write to some PC-using friends' USB drives and larger portable hard drives

The drives are probably formatted as NTFS. OSX can read, but not write, NTFS. See if they can use FAT for drives they send you. If you really need to write to NTFS drives, you could install Paragon
<http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/>

I'm having the same problems with two different 16GB flash drives.
I've erased, re-formatted, re-partitioned, but this only fixes the problem until I connect it to a pc (at work), as once I connect it to my mac again after this, the files have become corrupt and will not open.
This is really doing my head in - not helped by the fact that I bought one of the flash drives from the Apple store a week before I upgraded to SL.
I've also noticed a huge drop in write speed to the flash drives (during the brief interludes in which I can use them) since upgrading.
Amy chance of 10.6.2 sorting this out?

Can solve this without Windows. Open disk utility, click on drive, click on partition, change from current to 1 partition, select MS-DOS, go to options, change to MBR, click apply and your all done...

Hi folks. I'm having similar problems. Formatted everything according to the good advice in this discussion and things worked somewhat. However, if I drag files directly from the iTunes window to the USB stick, things tend to go wrong. My car stereo cannot recognize any songs on the USB stick in this case. I must copy the files directly out of a Finder window for everything to work. Even in this case, my car stereo has duplicates of some songs, some with a _ and some without. For example, I'll get talk.mp3 AND _talk.mp3, and _talk.mp3 will not play on the car stereo. In any case, not all FAT32's seem to be created equal.

However, if I drag files directly from the iTunes window to the USB stick, things tend to go wrong. My car stereo cannot recognize any songs on the USB stick in this case. I must copy the files directly out of a Finder window for everything to work. Even in this case, my car stereo has duplicates of some songs, some with a _ and some without. For example, I'll get talk.mp3 AND _talk.mp3, and _talk.mp3 will not play on the car stereo. In any case, not all FAT32's seem to be created equal.

Try BlueHarvest on the USB stick.
<http://www.zeroonetwenty.com/blueharvest/>

Great solution, so simple! Thank you Malcolm