Brand new USB flash drive is not showing any capacity on Macbook - please help!

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jessicasnap


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Hi all,

Generally I try to look up other posts and forums to find solutions to my problems, but I really couldn't find this specific issue anywhere! So I hope someone can help....

Need to download data off my old Macbook OS 10.5, so I bought a HP 32GB usb flash drive. When inserted, the mac recognises it's there, but when I tried to transfer some files, even just an individual jpeg, it says there is no free space. When I click on "get info" for the drive, it doesn't show any capacity whatsoever. I formatted it in Disk Utility, and in there is shows the full capacity of about 30GB. But when going back to the drive either on desktop or in finder, it still doesn't show any capacity/space. And when I say "no capacity" it doesn't say "zero" it just has a dash.

When I inserted flash drive into my new Macbook OS 10.11, it works fine, so the flash drive isn't corrupted or faulty!.... I checked on packaging and it does say that the flash drive should be compatible with Macs 10.3 and above! It is really frustrating, so any ideas on what I could try would be much appreciated.

Thanks!
 
M

MacInWin

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Welcome to the forum. I assume that from your description you unmounted and then remounted the drive, which was going to be my first suggestion. How is the drive formatted? That could be the difference. And have you tried formatting it on the "other" machine to see if it's a problem with the first one?
 
chscag

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jessicasnap said:
Hi all,

Generally I try to look up other posts and forums to find solutions to my problems, but I really couldn't find this specific issue anywhere! So I hope someone can help....

Need to download data off my old Macbook OS 10.5, so I bought a HP 32GB usb flash drive. When inserted, the mac recognises it's there, but when I tried to transfer some files, even just an individual jpeg, it says there is no free space. When I click on "get info" for the drive, it doesn't show any capacity whatsoever. I formatted it in Disk Utility, and in there is shows the full capacity of about 30GB. But when going back to the drive either on desktop or in finder, it still doesn't show any capacity/space. And when I say "no capacity" it doesn't say "zero" it just has a dash.

When I inserted flash drive into my new Macbook OS 10.11, it works fine, so the flash drive isn't corrupted or faulty!.... I checked on packaging and it does say that the flash drive should be compatible with Macs 10.3 and above! It is really frustrating, so any ideas on what I could try would be much appreciated.

Thanks!
Click to expand...

I'm a bit confused over what you did with the flash drive. A 32 GB flash drive from HP either came pre-formatted to FAT-32 or possibly NTFS. Did you format the flash drive using Disk Utility before trying to copy files to it? If the flash drive was pre-formatted to FAT-32 it should have been read and write capable from your Mac and not needed to be reformatted.
 

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