Formatting help

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I wish to format a jump drive - it shows no files, but has 8.5Gb in limbo on it, so formatting is necessary. How do I do that in 10.5.8?
 

chscag

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Formatting of an external disk or flash drive can be accomplished by using Disk Utility which is in your Applications, Utility folder.
 
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Second that. Rather than just erase the disk, I suggest creating a new partition. In disk utility, click on partition, select 1 partition, choose a format (HFS+ if you're only using it on macs, or MS-FAT if you're using it on PC's as well) and click on partition.

This erases and re-writes the whole partition table, rather than just zeros out data and should bring all our space back.

Saying that, the Jump is quite an old series of drives, and USB drives will fail eventually. If you have to reformat the drive several times and you keep getting phantom data (lack of space, my terms) then it's probably time for a new drive.

Hope that helps
 
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chas_m

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I wish to format a jump drive - it shows no files, but has 8.5Gb in limbo on it, so formatting is necessary. How do I do that in 10.5.8?

Based on his description, I would have said that formatting was completely unnecessary. Most likely, the OP simply didn't empty the trash *while the drive was mounted*.
 
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There was no trash on the drive, nor were there any files identified by finder - it had 8Gb used by presumably PC stuff that the mac could not identify. Formatting worked so I now have the 14Gb I wanted.
 

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