Thumb Drive transfer from OS to Windows

[mapleleafmenace]

Well I never thought I'd have a plug-and-play problem with OS, but here it is.

I recently put together a 6GB file that needed to be transferred from my Mac OS to my Windows partition. Too big to burn, and my only thumb drive was 4 GB. Simple solution: I went and shelled out 30 bucks for an 8GB drive.

Brought it home, plugged it in, dragged and dropped and what did I get? Error code 0 - cannot write to the drive. Googled it and the unanimous solution was to format the thumb drive, which I did. I formatted it to exactly the same format it had originally and by god it worked. Transfer successful.

So I skip over to my windows partition, plug the drive in, it installs its drivers successfully (according to windows) and lo and behold...I can't access the drive. Now don't get me wrong - windows knows it's there because I'm able to "safely remove" the USB mass storage device. It just won't recognize it in the Computer folder. Not even the "add hardware" option yielded any results.

Anyone have any suggestions (besides getting DTV off my lovely unibody MBP)?

 

[Phil A.]

Wirelessly posted (iPod touch 32GB: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/7A280f Safari/525.20)

The reason you couldn't write to the drive originally is that the drive will have been formatted as FAT32 which doesn't support files that big.
When you reformatted it as HFS, you could write the file but windows can't read hfs formatted drives. Easiest thing to do us download a trial of macdrive for your windows box which will then let it read the HFS formatted drive

 

[chrono1081]

Wirelessly posted (iPod touch 32GB: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/7A280f Safari/525.20)

The reason you couldn't write to the drive originally is that the drive will have been formatted as FAT32 which doesn't support files that big.
When you reformatted it as HFS, you could write the file but windows can't read hfs formatted drives. Easiest thing to do us download a trial of macdrive for your windows box which will then let it read the HFS formatted drive

+1

 

[old-wiz]

You could also format the thumb drive on windows as NTFS, this would allow windows to write the file and OSx to read the file. However OSx cannot write to NTFS without extra software.

 

[mapleleafmenace]

Hey thanks for the advice, guys It's much appreciated.

I tried downloading Macdrive, but it was foolish of me to expect a useful program to work on Windows Vista. So I decided to go old-wiz' route and snag some software to allow OS to write to NTFS.

My external hard drive is happily sucking up the file as I type this. So here's hoping it makes it over to Windows safely.

Thanks again

-Maple