Just One Drive, Thanks

June 4, 2006 5:18 PM

I just bought a cheap 256mb flash drive at the university bookstore. It has some bizarre formatting setup where it appears on my iBook (10.4) as two drives, one 1.44 mb, one 244.2 mb. Apparently there are some security features (a .pdf and .exe file were included, the latter of which is obviously no use to me) that are built in as well.

What I'd really like to do is just make this show up as a 256mb drive that I can use on my Mac or on a PC. I didn't realize that these ubiquitous thumb drives were such a pain in the ass to use. Or did I really make a mistake by not buying a "name brand" one?

Here's a link to the .pdf that was included. I don't know whether or not this is helpful: USB Disk [sic] Pro (.pdf).

posted by rossination to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

Macintosh HD -> Applications -> Utilities -> Disk Utility.

Select the entire stick (not just either of the two volumes on it), and erase. Tell it to reformat the whole stick as MS-DOS/FAT32 if you plan on sticking it into a PC, otherwise let it do HFS+ if you are going to be Mac-only.
posted by NucleophilicAttack at 5:23 PM on June 4, 2006

NucleophilicAttack is right, just format it and it will then appear as one drive. As you stated you want PC compatibility, FAT32 is recommended (unless you need compatibility with *really* old versions of windows).
As you will gather from the confusing manual, there is a windows based encryption driver included, should PC users wish to password protect the drive. Similar things are available for Mac from third parties, if that feature is of interest.
posted by bystander at 6:54 PM on June 4, 2006

Response by poster: That's what I thought, too -- but they're not showing up as separate volumes, they're showing up as separate drives. I can't select the entire stick. If I try to cmd-click both, then my options under "erase" are grayed out. I'll try to post a screenshot when I can.
posted by rossination at 9:07 PM on June 4, 2006

If you can't find a way to reformat under OSX, you can always borrow a friend's PC for a couple minutes & use that to format it.
posted by scalefree at 10:22 PM on June 4, 2006

You're getting a 1.44MB drive because it's trying to appear as a Floppy drive to PC's, thus getting around Microsoft's protections against Autorun-ning binaries off of USB (but not Floppy or CD).
posted by effugas at 10:35 PM on June 4, 2006

Side note -- because of this, there isn't a partition in play. It's really exposing two devices over the USB bus. Nothing you can do to merge them, really.
posted by effugas at 10:35 PM on June 4, 2006

Response by poster: So basically, I have to just format it FAT and ignore the "bonus drive" that shows up?
posted by rossination at 10:49 PM on June 4, 2006

Fill the bonus drive full of PC viruses :)
posted by flabdablet at 3:40 AM on June 5, 2006

If what effugas is saying is right & your thumbdrive is presenting two devices & not just two partitions to you, there's no way to combine them. What you've got in that case is basically two thumbdrives living in the same housing. Either configuration's possible so it's worth trying to combine them, but it seems to me that Dan's suggestion is the more likely one so I wouldn't put too much effort into it.
posted by scalefree at 3:37 AM on June 6, 2006