AAM: Formatting USB Flash Drive

Hi all,

Apparently formatting USB Flash drives on a Mac isn’t as straightforward as you’d thing, especially if you’re a new Mac owner. User haye321 had been having troubles with his flash drive on his MacBook pro some time ago. His drive periodically uses up memory for reasons unbeknown to him, forcing him to take it over to his PC to format that will then restore the memory. After a quick chat with Apple tech guys, it seems that there isn’t much he can do for the time being. However, user Buzz Bumble has been kind enough to lend a hand and offer some advice for haye321. Check out his thoughts below.

Before I sign off for this week, if you cast your mind back to last weeks Ask Apple Matters, you’ll remember one user having trouble with his HDTV and screen resolutions. It seems that there hasn’t be a complete solution just yet but user John Lockwood has come up with a feasible idea. Keep on reading to find out more.

Question Of The Week

How Do I Format a USB Flash Drive?

Question by: haye321

I have a USB flash drive and it will periodically just use up memory on nothing for unknown reasons but every time it happens I have to leave my Mac Book Pro and go to my PC desktop and re-format the flash drive and that will restore the memory. I called my local Apple store but they couldn’t tell me how to format it on a Mac (Apple really does hire anyone, they dont have to know anything about using a Mac and its really annoying) so I was wondering if anyone here knew how to do something like that.

Answer by: Buzz Bumble

I don’t know for sure, but I would have thought that just like any other “disk” you could format it using Disk Utility (in Mac OS X’s Utilities folder in the Application folder) or Special->Erase Disk (in Mac OS 9 and earlier).

I can’t think of any reason why it should fill up “on nothing” either. Sounds a bit fishy.

I recently bought a couple of these Flash drives for work and have discovered that plugging them into the USB port on the keyboard can cause problems. They seem to go to sleep (possibly linked with the mouse going sleeping) and the Mac loses contact. They work fine via the USB ports on the back of the Mac though.

The only hiccup might be that formatting the drive on the Mac may not make it usable on Windows PCs. I’m not sure what formatting Mac OS uses these days. You can of course re-format it on the Windows PC and then use it on both.

I had a thought about the “nothing” - if you’re copying quite a few files onto and off the drive, then it may be the extra garbage that Mac OS X stores in invisible files and folders. When you put the drive into a Windows PC you’ll see a folder called “Mac OS X” (from memory) and probably a pile of DS store and icon files. Mac OS X uses these to store specific Mac information like icons, which files are on the desktop.

Feedback by: haye321

Thanks for that clarification on the “nothing” but how would you recommend dealing with that problem on Mac OS X being as you cant see the file?

Answer by: Buzz Bumble

I haven’t had much experience with Mac OS X yet (my Mac is still using Mac OS 9.2).

You can see them on a Windows PC and there’s probably a shareware / freeware file browser for the Mac that allows you to see these invisible files, but it’s probably not a good idea to go around deleting them if there’s still proper files on the drive that you want, so it’s likely to be easier to simply re-format the drive as and when you need to.

I can’t think of a reason why you’d get lots of these filling up the drive quickly ... unless you’ve got something like the web browser set to store it’s temporary / cache files on there.

View thread.

Last Weeks Question

Resolution Troubles on HDTV using Mac

Question by: BigMac

I have a G4 Dual 450 Running Panther that I hooked up to a small 21” HD Flat Screen TV through VGA to VGA cable. It worked fine but then I went ahead and started fiddling with the screen resolution settings and set it to something the TV cant handle. I got a screen on the TV saying “incompatible format” but I can’t figure out how to switch it back without plugging it into another monitor (which I don’t have). I tried restarting and that didn’t work.
I just installed the OS so I have nothing on it yet. Is there a keystroke to reset back to factory settings?

Answer by: John Lockwood

Many TVs especially the new flat screen LCD/Plasmas, do not correctly report resolutions to a computer via DVI/HDMI connections, usually VGA connections are less problematic.

For these problematic TVs additional software such as DisplayConfig X or SwitchRes X can help.

See http://www.3dexpress.de/ for DisplayConfig X and http://www.switchres.info for SwitchRes X.

I have also seen that older Macs with older video cards are less capable than newer Macs in terms of variety of resolutions supported.
However the above is more likely to apply to DVI rather than VGA.

Another suggestion for all instances (DVI, VGA, Mac, PC) is to set up the computer so it can be remotely controlled by another computer, this could be via VNC, Apple Remote Desktop, Timbuktu, or if you are using Windows XP (you are obviously not) Microsoft Remote Desktop. By remotely controlling the computer, you can change resolutions even if the display itself is not working. I used this approach myself for example when experimenting trying to get the best results connecting a Mac mini to a Sony 40” LCD HDTV via DVI.

View thread.

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