Hi, nihilus.
The flash drive can be reformatted with Disk Utility. Mount the Flash drive and then launch Disk Utility (in Macintosh HD > Applications > Utilities).
Select the Device, not the Volume. For example, when you look at your startup disk in Disk Utility, you might see:<pre>
233.8 GB Maxtor 7L250S0
Macintosh HD</pre>The first line — 233.8 GB Maxtor 7L250S0 — is the
device, i.e. the hard drive on which your startup disk resides. The second line,
Macintosh HD listed below and indented from the first line, is a
volume on that device.
You should see the same kind of indented display with your Flash drive, so select the Flash device.
Click the Erase tab.
If you only want to use the Flash drive with your Mac, select either "Mac OS Extended" or "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" as the format. To use it with Macs and PCs, select MS-DOS.
Note that the
._file files you note are the resource forks of Mac files you copied to the drive from your Mac, and these are only visible when you use the Flash drive on a PC. These are normal and indicate the Flash drive is already formatted for Windows.
When you copy or save a file from a Mac OS X system to a Windows shared volume or a Windows-formatted disk, the Mac creates two files: the data fork (xxx) and the resource fork (._xxx). This is called
Apple Double Format and is normal. The resource fork contains additional data about the file that is exclusive to the Mac that cannot be saved otherwise on Windows-formatted disks. This is new with Mac OS X, as documented in
Mac OS X: Apple Double Format Creates File Name With the Prefix '._'.
The resource fork files (._xxx) are necessary if you want to copy the file back to the Mac and retain the metadata. The resource forks of files are invisible when they are used on the Mac: the Mac OS Extended file system (aka HFS Plus or HFS+) uses forked files, with a file having both data and resource forks.
You can delete the resource forks on the Windows disk if and only if you don't care about losing the resource fork information should you copy them back to the Mac, such as comments, image preview icon, etc. Some Mac applications use the resource fork data, so deleting the resource fork can be problematic if you copy the file back to the Mac. Likewise moving the file while not also moving its associated resource fork when using the data on a PC can result in problems when using some files again on the Mac.
You can't prevent the resource forks from being created if you copy or save files from the Mac to the Windows share or Windows-formatted disk via Finder.
Finder will also create .DS_Store files on the Windows disk. These are related to folders you have copied/created on the Windows disk from the Mac. These files contain information used by Mac OS X's Finder regarding how a folder's window was last displayed, e.g. arrangement of icons in such, etc.
Some have reported using the donationware utility
KopyMac to copy file from Macs to Windows shared volumes without the resource forks.
Note that some of the information above is from the "Mac-Windows Integration" chapter of my book,
Troubleshooting Mac® OS X, Tiger Edition.
😉 Dr. Smoke
Author:
Troubleshooting Mac® OS X
---
Note: The information provided in the link(s) above is freely available. However, because I own The X Labâ„¢, a commercial Web site to which some of these links point, the Apple Discussions
Terms of Use require I include the following disclosure statement with this post:
I may receive some form of compensation, financial or otherwise, from my recommendation or link.
