3 questions - an external hard drive and 2 flash drive q's

A

alexmurphy

New Member
first question, I have a seagate external hard drive (here is a pic). As many of you know, these are made to work with only a PC, but if you change some settings when you plug it into a mac (the settings i don't remember) it can work with just a mac. Now, a couple years ago I made it work on just a mac.

However, i would like it to work on a mac and a PC. I have a school laptop that is a PC that i will be taking files to store on the hard drive often, and my mac needs it to back up all my music/pictures and some other important files onto. I dont want to go out and buy another one if it is possible to make this one compatible with anything i plug it into. Is it possible? How do i do it? Keep in mind, I kiiiind of know a lot about computers, but nothing when it comes to hardware like this.


Second question
I have a SanDisk Cruzer 8gb flash drive, but it has 2 problems. First off, when i first got it and plugged it into the computer, it had 7.96gb of free space. but now, even if i delete all files off the stick, it only has 3.6gb of free space. what's going on here and how can i fix it?

Third
The other thing with this is that when you plug it into any PC it tries to "Install Driver Device software" that basically makes it impossible to open from My computer. It then brings up this little red square, and when you click on it, it has a mock start menu that then lets you open the drive to view files, etc. Every sandisk flash drive i have owned does this, and its annoying. It makes what should take about 45 seconds last 4 or 5 minutes. How can i make that stop too?

Thanks for any help you can give me.
 
in relation to the sandisk cruzer try downloading parted magic, it creates a linux based boot disc thats works from cd boot before you enter windows, it reads more file types than windows perhaps the usb has some how become corrupt or something, use parted magic to blank and reformat the whole usb stick to fat32.
 
alexmurphy said:
first question, I have a seagate external hard drive (here is a pic). As many of you know, these are made to work with only a PC, but if you change some settings when you plug it into a mac (the settings i don't remember) it can work with just a mac. Now, a couple years ago I made it work on just a mac.

However, i would like it to work on a mac and a PC. I have a school laptop that is a PC that i will be taking files to store on the hard drive often, and my mac needs it to back up all my music/pictures and some other important files onto. I dont want to go out and buy another one if it is possible to make this one compatible with anything i plug it into. Is it possible? How do i do it? Keep in mind, I kiiiind of know a lot about computers, but nothing when it comes to hardware like this.


Second question
I have a SanDisk Cruzer 8gb flash drive, but it has 2 problems. First off, when i first got it and plugged it into the computer, it had 7.96gb of free space. but now, even if i delete all files off the stick, it only has 3.6gb of free space. what's going on here and how can i fix it?

Third
The other thing with this is that when you plug it into any PC it tries to "Install Driver Device software" that basically makes it impossible to open from My computer. It then brings up this little red square, and when you click on it, it has a mock start menu that then lets you open the drive to view files, etc. Every sandisk flash drive i have owned does this, and its annoying. It makes what should take about 45 seconds last 4 or 5 minutes. How can i make that stop too?

Thanks for any help you can give me.
Click to expand...

The start menu thing is called U3. If you hit it, over on the right column, there should be a option to remove it, or to go to the options, and you remove it from there. Then, format the whole thing as FAT32 so it will work.
 
bkribbs said:
The start menu thing is called U3. If you hit it, over on the right column, there should be a option to remove it, or to go to the options, and you remove it from there. Then, format the whole thing as FAT32 so it will work.
Click to expand...

how do i do that??

if it matters, i have windows 7
 
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