Finder & external 500GB FAT32 usb disk drive

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Hello,

I recently bought an external hard drive which I formatted for FAT32 (to allow windows to also use the disk). The drive works perfectly and copying from mac <=> hard drive has never failed.

Finder however has problems....sometimes finder fails to list some folders that really do exists i.e. I can see them on the Mac command-line ($ ls /Volumes/STORAGE/...... will always list what's really there).

Also....if for example finder is not displaying the folder "foobar", if I type "foobar" in finders spotlight field it will find the missing folder!

Is this a problem that anybody else has encountered with Finder?

Brendan.
 
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I have exact same problem

My Mac Pro has 500GByte FireWire HD and 400GByte RAID1 drive. When I copy folder into these drives, finder seems corrupted and can't find the folder which exist. I even encounter same problem in MacBook Pro mounting FAT32 HD over smb.
Both drive show exact same problem. I can solve this by unmount volume and mount it back. I format them as HFS+, no such a problem happen as expected.

My main reason for FAT32 format is to share RAID HD between Mac and Windows. I decided to install MacDrive7 into Windows, so Windows can read HFS+ format. But this problem is a little bit annoying.

System:
Mac Pro 2.66GHz, 4GByte Memory, OS version:10.4.10
 
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What did you use to format the drive to FAT-32?
 
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they both said they formatted to fat32 for the ease of use with both windows and mac, a great idea (for something like a flash drive) but i was under the impression fat32 couldn't handle a partition larger than 32GB (please correct me if i'm wrong) which could probably 'cause a lot of issues such as the ones you guys are having.
 
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I use diskutil command to format HD as FAT32. 32GByte limit of FAT32 doesn't come from format itself. FAT32 can support up to 2TB. Windows is the one who put this limit since Microsoft want people to use NTFS.
 
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I used disk utility (the "erase" feature) to format the 500G drive for MS-DOS. I have done some more investigating and found that finder only has problems when I create files folders on the command line. If I "mkdir barfoo" using Terminal finder fails to show the folder (but as I said spotlight will find barfoo).

I did notice that OS X (I'm very new to Mac by the way) is creating a hidden binary file in each folder ".DS_Store" so my guess is that mkdir is not updating that file in the same way that finder does when creating a directory file.
 
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Yep. Perhaps a silly question, but why are you making the folder via the CLI vice the GUI?
 
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I wrote a command line program to do some "cleaning" of my mp3s which created directories and renamed files. That program was using the same libraries as mkdir to create the directories.
 
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Also....if for example finder is not displaying the folder "foobar", if I type "foobar" in finders spotlight field it will find the missing folder!

Is this a problem that anybody else has encountered with Finder?

Brendan.

Yes I had a similar problem. In my external drive, FAT32 formatted, on 2 occasions a folder disappeared. It happened either both times or at least one time when I was renaming the folder. I typed the name, then pressed "enter" and it took maybe that name or a different name, or anyway went a bit mental for a while, taking the name of a folder which actually already existed, then if I clicked it it would move (in finder) and so on. Was being totally weird. Then disapeared. If I did a search for any names of files or folders within that (now disappeared) folder, I would get results in spotlight. But there was something different about those files. I don't remember what, maybe the colour or something? (Of the name). I don't know what happened. And I don't know about computers. Maybe they became hidden files or something? Now I don't even remember the names of anything in there. So, how can I recover them??

Is this common? Is it because the hard disk is faulty?

Justin
 
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Your drive is not faulty. I am having the same issue with two different external hard drives. Both of mine are formatted as fat32. Folders will occasionally change to names of different folders when I click them and files inside will disappear when I click them. It doesn't happen all the time, but when it does happen it is very annoying. I use these hard drives on windows and mac computers and this issue seems to be mac related.
 
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Your drive is not faulty. I am having the same issue with two different external hard drives. Both of mine are formatted as fat32. Folders will occasionally change to names of different folders when I click them and files inside will disappear when I click them. It doesn't happen all the time, but when it does happen it is very annoying. I use these hard drives on windows and mac computers and this issue seems to be mac related.
What is the solution? How can we access those files? And, more tricky, how can we find them when we have forgotten what they even are! Is there something like "show hidden files" or something?

And you said it is mac related - when you have files disappear or get renamed on your mac, when you then use your windows machine is the fault remaining? Is the original name still there, and are the mac-disappeared files apparent?

Thanks
Justin
 
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When I connect to windows, the fault does not remain. Some times if I give the computer a little time and reconnect, the folder is fine; sometimes a simple reboot does the trick. I don't have a real answer as to why the problem exists or how to "fix" it, but I do know, I have never actually lost the files, mac just for a time couldn't figure out the directories. Like I said, sometimes I'll just connect it to my windows box and I can immediately see the the files and folders. Weird, huh?
 

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