Depending on the storage capacity of the drive, flash drives typically come formatted with the FAT, FAT32 or exFAT file system, which are compatible with Windows and Mac operating systems. A bootable USB flash drive will help you get your Mac back to working condition, by letting you use all of the tools a fully-working Mac has available. In addition to being able to use Disk Utility, the Finder, and Terminal, and have access to the Internet, you can also load some specific emergency tools onto your USB flash drive.

I got this new flash drive. It's a generic brand. The first thing I did was plugged it into my iMac, saved a few files, and renamed the drive. However, when I plug it into a PC, essentiallly any version of Windows, it won't show up. On Windows XP, it'll try to recognize it when I first put it into the port, then it'll say that it failed to recognize it. After that, it just won't bother with it anymore. On Windows 7 Ultimate, it does nothing. Haven't tried Vista.

I thought that it was a problem with the Windows OS, so I tried looking for the drive in Disk Management. It just doesn't show up at all, anywhere. Plugging it into a Windows is like doing nothing.

It works perfectly fine on Mac, it reads, writes, copies, everything. So I reformatted the drive with Disk Utility using FAT32, even partitioned it, all MS-DOS. I actually did this several times and tried plugging it into both the XP and 7, but still nothing happens. I just don't understand what could possibly be wrong with it.

I saw reviews on it and every single person says they have had no problem with it on their PC. One even said it works just fine between PC and Mac.

Is mine just defective or is there something I haven't done?

iMac, Mac OS X (10.5.6)

Flash Drive Not Reading Mac

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