Flashdrive Macbook Pro to PC Problem

I hope I am posting in the right place!

I copied some files onto my flashdrive from my macbook pro last night. When I plugged my flashdrive into my PC at work, I was unable to open it and got a message that said "drive not formated. format drive?" I said no.

The drive has recently been reformated. I had been using it to store photos. The photos were kept on it and the drive was used only rarely. I recently transferred the photos to an external hardrive and reformatted the drive on my mac.

It's an 8 gig flashdrive and it has not been used very much.

Any ideas?

If you're going to use the drive between OSes, it needs to be formatted with a filesystem that both can read. I am going to assume that you formatted it with HFS (the default) and I would suggest that you format it as FAT which is both readable and writeable by both OSes.

Thank you. I noticed another oddity with this drive. When I plug it into my macbook, I get two drive icons on my desktop. One where I store my files and one with the instructions that came on the drive.

Why does it do this and how can I make it stop? It's pretty annoying.

If it shows up as two drives, it means that there are in fact two partitions. Is this a SanDisk U3 flash drive by any chance?

It is a Princeton Technology flash drive. Is there any way I can "unpartition" it? I use it for transporting microsoft office files and occasionally pictures between work, school, and home. I don't need anything fancy.

Thank you for your help!

The best way to remove the extra partition from the flash drive is to plug it into your PC and use Disk Manager to remove both partitions. Then create one partition on the drive and format it to FAT-32. It's easier to do this on a PC than use Disk Utility from your Mac.