Unzipping

I have a piece of electronics that I occasionally need to load a software update into. This update comes in the form of downloading a zipped file which I must unzip and load onto a flashdrive. I just had to do this and I worked at this and called apple tech support on how to unzip,they just had me double click the download and then drag it onto the flashdrive.Did this and then tried to load into electronics many times to no avail using three different flashdrives.
Gave up and went to my old PC,downloaded,used WinRAR to unzip,put on flashdrive,attached flash to electronics and success on the first attempt.
What did the Apple tech guy miss telling me.?
golferstan

Double-clicking on the compressed folder should do the trick regardless of its location. Perhaps drag said compressed folder, drop it into the flash drive, and then repeat the process for decompression within the flash drive's directory as an alternative method.

What could be happening is that, on the Mac, expanding an archive file generally will cause a folder to be created with the contents of the archive in that folder. It may be expected that those contents are at the root of your flash drive, and not in a folder, for the update to succeed.

they just had me double click the download and then drag it onto the flashdrive

Click to expand...

I was confused by this part of your post. What was the "it" you dragged? If the zip file, that was wrong. What you should have dragged was what came out of the file, usually a folder, or the contents of the folder. I'm sure that is what you meant, but thought it worth asking, at least.

Download YemuZip, double click and move to Utilities folder. When you download a .zip file, double click it and it will open, then drag the application/folder to the flash drive which should be formatted HFS.


http://www.yellowmug.com/

Actually, I suspect that the problem was that his thumb drive was (unusually) formatted for NTFS, as some of the larger-capacity ones are. Macs can't natively write to NTFS-formatted drives, so naturally the attempt to copy would fail (but work perfectly on a PC).