Problem with USB Flash Memory (FAT32)

Hi, I need help using my USB flash memory using both on Mac and Windows.

To use on both Mac and Win, I formatted my USB flash memory drive (I call it USB from now on) with FAT on Disc Utility. I believe Disc Utility formats as FAT32.
I named the USB very simple way. I named it BLUE to avoid any mess caused by file names.
That's good is't it? It should work on both Mac and Windows? Right?

But it doesn't.

I have tried with 3 USBs I have. (2x 8GB and 1x 16GB) They are all less than a year old, and made by SanDisc and TDK, good manufactures. So it's not problem of actual USB, it's problem caused by my OS X I think.

When I plugged USB to Windows, it says I have to format the USB to use on Windows.
The same error occurs both Vista and XP.
So I decided to format as FAT on Windows but I could not format correctly. Whatever I do, Windows formats only 200MB out of 8GB or 16GB of the USB. And back to Mac again, I pugged these USB formatted on Windows and they comes up as 2 partitioned drive, one formatted on Mac and the other formatted on Win (200MB)

Does anybody have any idea about this?
I'M NOT SURE but it seems like this thing happened after I upgraded my OS X from 10.6.1 to 10.6.2.

Thanks in advance.

ユニボディ MacBook Pro (Late 2008) 2.4GHz with 4GB RAM, Mac OS X (10.6.2), iMac G3 → iMac G5 → MacBook (Late 2006) → MacBook Pro (Late 2008)

Posted on Nov 14, 2009 10:28 AM

21 replies

Feb 10, 2010 7:15 PM in response to uhu

I have a similar problem, both on my iMac and MacBook Air.
Both run 10.6.2.

When formatting the drive (a 16gb gxt usb memory stick) as FAT32 with the mac, I can copy in the drive using the mac but cannot access the drive in win XP. When opening the disc manager in XP, I see the drive, but there is no letter assigned and I get an error message when trying to assign a letter or to format it. There was a 200Mb partition that seems to be attached to the drive also but under SL disk utility, 1 only see one partition.

I downloaded macdrive trial version on my XP machine. I formatted HFS+ on my mac then open it on the PC. After this, the drive was recognized and I was able to format as FAT32 under XP and it worked fine. I was able to copy files from my PC and when I plugged the drive into my mac, it is not recognized. When running disk utility, it appears as a HFS drive!

Will try tomorrow with another 16gb stick from another brand.

SHINFRANK Author

Level 1

0 points

Nov 14, 2009 11:06 AM in response to SHINFRANK

One more thing,
it copies actual folder that created on Mac but it does NOT copy contents of the Folder. (the error -36)

SHINFRANK Author

Level 1

0 points

Nov 14, 2009 12:47 PM in response to Kappy

Kappy

Thank you for your help anyway. I'll wait for someone who might know.

SHINFRANK Author

Level 1

0 points

Nov 14, 2009 4:18 PM in response to Dick Dastardly

Hi thanks for your advice, And I do have U3 USB but I have deleted the software when I bought it and I don't think U3 is affecting it. I could use the drive normally until few days ago. Thank you.

NickS

Level 1

5 points

Nov 21, 2009 11:45 AM in response to SHINFRANK

Hmm, just tried this and wasn't fixed for me...

Downloaded MacOSXUpd10.6.2.dmg, verified with SHA1, rebooted and ran a permission repair and tried again. Exact same problem as before.

pygaro

Level 1

0 points

Feb 11, 2010 3:41 AM in response to Kappy

Thank you! Worked perfectly!

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Problem with USB Flash Memory (FAT32)