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Found the solution to an anoying problem


WRGKMC

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Like many people today I use USB memory sticks allot for copying music, moving songs to another computer and using them to listen to music in the car.

I had some sticks with problems and reformatted them and they worked fine on the host computer but when plugged into another computer the files were

not playable and in a vehicle the USB device wasn't even recognized.

 

I had tried NTFS and FAT32 formatting and neither of these worked. The one drive is 64G so Fat32 is not a good choice because of the drive size and

NTFS is a Microsoft proprietary formatting only good on windows computers.

 

After some extensive digging I found they format the larger USB sticks with exFAT file format. This format works with both Macs and PC's and just about any hardware devices

including Automobile systems. If the drive is 32G or below you can use Fat32, but larger you need to use exFAT which allows for both larger drive sizes and larger file sizes.

 

You may want to keep this in mind especially with these larger thumb drives getting larger and cheaper. 64G is large enough to run an operating system off it

and it can be a handy thing to revert back to an older operating system just by plugging in a USB stick.

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ExFAT wasn't around during 95/98 days only FAT32 and NTFS used for NT servers.

 

I believe XP on up will format to exFAT. exFAT was a non proprietary answer for formating large drives up to 2 terabytes. NTFS is a Microsoft proprietary formatting for large windows system network drives.

 

The exFAT does work across Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux platforms so you're able to move files from one to the other without having to reformat the memory stick to that system.

 

exFAT also also allows individual files larger than 4 Gig to be stored intact. Video recordings for example using FAT32 will break the video files into 2 or 4 Gig segments.

 

When I reformatted the drive to NTFS it wasn't recognized by the car radio. Fat 32 fragmented the files so I lost some kind of data making the wave files playable. Maybe it was the size of the wave files, I don't know. I do have smaller thumb drives that are formatted with FAT32 which work fine. exFAT worked so it must be the larger thumb drives need this formatting.

 

Thumb drives also have some kind of system file and serial number in a hidden file. I have one thumb drive that's been corrupted and I believe it has something to do with that file. I found a few programs that check the drive and others that can rewrite the file or correct the serial number. I think it got corrupted when I attempted to format it for NTFS. The drive was running really slow so I thought formatting would get any junk off there.

 

I suppose the best thing I've learned is never format a thumb drive. Just delete files. I suspect the same holds true for a SS drive.

 

There is allot of import thumb drives out there being sold with substandard memory or had chip failures reducing their capacity. They are sold cheap but cant actually hold the amount of data they are rated for. Formatting them wipes them out completely.

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exFAT solved another problem for me. I had received a 10GB Mac MOV video file on a Mac USB stick and Windows couldn't read it. I formatted a USB stick as exFAT using W7, and plugged it into the Mac. The Mac file transferred over to it, and then I could use it in Windows. Other formats didn't work because either they weren't agnostic or couldn't handle a single file of that size.

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