weird USB drive issues

i have a 8GB patriot flash drive that i've been using between my mac and PC.

The other day i wanted to wipe it clean. I formatted in on my mac under FAT, and when i tried to bring it up on my PC it asked to reformat it. When i went to format it said it was only 200MB??

any ideas?

try using FAT32 instead of FAT.

Yeah i tried both FAT and FAT32...still the same result.

Mac and Windows file systems are not compatible.

You partitioned 4.8 GB and its for the Mac, so that 200MB is now only showing up for windows.
You'll need to remove that mac partition and partition for windows, if you want the full amount to show up on windows again.

It's a very common issue, but this should solve it.

Shouldn't matter. Disk Utility can format using FAT or FAT-32 as well as the native Mac file system. Windows should have no trouble recognizing the partition(s) as FAT or FAT-32.

To the OP:

Some flash drives - especially the newer ones which are preset at the factory and self booting - should NEVER be formatted. Formatting will destroy the special structure of the drive and will render it useless in most cases.

I don't know if your drive is one of those but it sounds like it might be. The only thing I can suggest is try to wipe it clean again using the Disk Management utility of Windows, create one partition for the entire drive, and format it as FAT-32. If that doesn't work, you might have a nice ornament for your key chain.

Regards.

chscag said:

If that doesn't work, you might have a nice ornament for your key chain.

Regards.

Click to expand...

Bit of an expensive one, don't you think?