HDD GURU FORUMS

I have two of these Patriot 64GB flash drives for MP3 storage & play. I have a USB & iPhone docking radios in several rooms & I have a USB capable radio in my vehicle. So I can take a flash drive & install it on every device for listening. Here is the issue:

I transferred all my MP3's to both 64GB drives - my PC (USB 2.0) recognizes the flash & the files (this is the PC that I store all my MP3s on), my daughter's Apple MacBook Pro recognizes the flash & lists all the files BUT

My work windows laptop (USB 2.0) will not recognize it & in fact states it needs to be formatted but the laptop fails to format it when I tried. My USB enabled radios will not recognize the drives & cannot read them but will accept 32GB/16GB/8GB sticks that I have.

Any ideas here as to what is going on?

I have used my home PC (USB 2.0) to reformat both the drives twice - reloaded the files - same result. My last resort as I write this is to reformat with the HDDGURU low level format software with hopes that this will somehow "fix" whatever is causing my equipment not to recognize the Drives. Any & all help is appreciated as I am in the middle of a music project that has a short deadline.

Several possible options, and since this isn't a Windows or PC or radio support forum you may get better help in those areas elsewhere. My initial thoughts are:

senorpena wrote:My work windows laptop (USB 2.0) will not recognize it & in fact states it needs to be formatted but the laptop fails to format it when I tried.

Since you mention another PC works OK with the same 64GB drives, then this seems to be a laptop-specific issue (perhaps specific to the OS installation on that PC). Therefore that is where I would focus, if I was in your position.

senorpena wrote:My USB enabled radios will not recognize the drives & cannot read them but will accept 32GB/16GB/8GB sticks that I have.

I've seen USB radios which have limits on the maximum capacity of drives they can use. Based on your comments, and assuming that the 64GB drives are confirmed OK from your tests with your PC & Mac, then possible reasons include - either the 64GB drives are drawing more current than the radios are designed to provide; or they are a greater capacity than the radios are designed to work with; or they have not been partitioned in a compatible way (some USB radios would use the first 32GB partition on a 64GB drive, for example). Again, this seems to be an equipment (radio) issue / limitation, since you seem to be saying that the 64GB drives work OK elsewhere.

Just to be on the safe side, I would fully test (write / read / compare - multiple times) those 64GB drives on a PC where they seem to work now, to get some confidence in the drives themselves, before relying on them for important data, and to reduce the chances of you being misled in case your odd results are actually due to any strange behaviour of the drives.

Hope that gives you some suggestions of things to consider in your testing.

Thanks Vulcan - I've spent so much time trying to figure out the that I have "learned" what it could be and will share just in case others have this same issues. Here they are in numerical sequence:

1. My desktop is Win7 and my work PC is WinXP - so I think there are compatibility issues when you Copy from the Win7 machines to Flash Drives & then try to use that Flash on a WinXP machine. Something bothers me about that but that is all I can think of - if anyone can confirm this observation that would be great.
2. The file system for the Win7 is NTFS but the FD format is Fat32. I used the Win7 machine to reformat the FD's & then copied files over to see if the WinXP machine could see it but to no avail. I then used the low level format software to wipe clean the SDs & then formatted them again as FAT but again - no luck - hence my conclusion that files saved via Win7 cannot be seen by a WinXP machine.
3. As for the USB radios - apparently your are correct - the issue there is that these radios have a limit of no more than 32GB so they cannot read the 64GB FDs - to bad for me - oh well - the radios are only 1.5+ years old so maybe the newer hardware will read 64GB.

For those of you looking to purchase a USB Radio unit - vehicle or not - read the manual on-line before you purchase so you can see what the Max is for the FD for the hardware you expect to buy.

Again - anyone have any ideas on why a Win7 (NTFS) machine saving to a USB FD cannot be read by another MS Win operating box - p[lease share.