Help erasing and formating flash drive

[Idioteque]

Hi all,

I just bought across a 2gb memorex flash drive. I wanted to erase it and reformat it. How should I format it. I want to use it between PC and OS X. Should it be MS-DOS OS X journaled, or something else.


ALSO, everytime it mounts in OS X it has a CD partition scheme on it and it mounts a CD image. I went into disc utility to erase that partition, but it will not let me. the option is greyed out on that partition. I want 1 partiton useable between windows and OS x with none of this software or partions on it. Any advice.


Thanks

 

[adamb100]

Well since Windows cant read OS X partitions and Mac OS X can read/write NTFS, use the Windows format.

 

[gonyr]

likely solution...

You probably bought a u3 enabled flash drive. They claim it's the latest, greatest thing, but it seems pretty horrendous and useless to me. I just had the same exact problem last week. To remove the u3 partition, use this link:

http://www.u3.com/uninstall/Default.aspx

Unfortunately, their uninstaller only works on windows, but it did work flawlessly for me once I got to a machine to run it on.

Long time lurker, first time post, and I even got to help someone!

 

[reh]

Well since Windows cant read OS X partitions and Mac OS X can read/write NTFS, use the Windows format.

Mac OS X can not write to NTFS, only read. Use the MS-DOS format (it's either FAT16 or FAT32, but that's not a huge issue).

 

[adamb100]

How come I can transfer stuff my XP Machine then that uses NTFS?

 

[gonyr]

Mac OS X can not write to NTFS, only read. Use the MS-DOS format (it's either FAT16 or FAT32, but that's not a huge issue).

I used FAT16 on mine (FAT32 wasn't an option when I formatted it in disk utility) and it works fine on both Windows at work and my Macs at home.

 

[reh]

How come I can transfer stuff my XP Machine then that uses NTFS?

It sounds like your transferring over a network, which makes drive formats irrelevant. We're talking local disks and drives here.

 

[adamb100]

ohhhh..never knew that.

 

[zephead]

With NTFS, you can transfer stuff from Windows to Mac, but you can't copy from Mac to Windows using NTFS. Either FAT or FAT32 would work between Windows and Mac with flash drives.

 

[Idioteque]

thanks guys,

it was the u3 unstall that worked. That whole u3 thing is a POS. How lame is it to mount a CD or run a program everytime you connect the drive. Sucks for presentations for clients and such. Anyway thanks for the help.


John