Mac OS X v10.3 "Panther" doesn't like my Cruzer

For some strange reason, I've never been able to get my U3 Cruzer Micro flash drive to work on Panther. It works on Windows 2000+, GNU/Linux, Mac OS 9 and 10.4 without any sort of driver or configuration, but Panther asks me if I want to initialize, ignore or eject it. Oddly enough, the package my drive came in says it's compatible with Mac OS X 10.1 and up.

Well... how is it formatted? Have you removed the U3 partition or done anything out of the ordinary to it?

It's formatted as FAT32, and I did uninstall the U3 junk with Sandisk's utility.

I tried both of my Cruzers on my PowerBook running 10.3.9, and it reads them fine. They are configured identical to yours, so the problem isn't inherrent in the OS or the drives themselves.

Try creating a new user and see if there are any problems reading from that account.

I created a new user account to test your theory, but still no success. It's a pretty clean install of Mac OS X. I think I read somewhere that installing the operating system with Mac OS 9 disk drivers enabled causes the U3 Cruzer drives to not work.

kahlil88 said:

I created a new user account to test your theory, but still no success. It's a pretty clean install of Mac OS X. I think I read somewhere that installing the operating system with Mac OS 9 disk drivers enabled causes the U3 Cruzer drives to not work.

Click to expand...

I did a little Googling on the matter and it seems you partially hit that on the head. If you formatted the Cruzer in FAT32 with the "OS 9" driver option still checked, then that likely is the problem. Your main drive being formatted in that manner shouldn't have any effect on how other drives mount.

The last time I formatted the Cruzer was when I removed the U3 junk (on a system running Windows XP), so it can't be the Mac OS 9 disk driver issue.

Hmmm. Well the best I can suggest is to reformat the Cruzers, perhaps using Disk Utility in OS X this time, and see if that makes a diff.

Oddly enough, reformatting on a Panther system worked. Are there different versions of FAT32 or something?