About a year ago I bought a 64GB Sandisk Cruzer Glide USB drive and it worked fine-- I ended up loading a total of about 5GB of files in it. Then I didn’t need it for several months, so it just lay around. Yesterday I tried to move a file (less than 5MB) from my Mac to it, and got the message that it was full. The Mac Inspector reports that the Cruzer contains 64G of files and no free space. Transferring the Cruzer to my PC, the Properties tab reports 59.6GB used space and 64KB free space.
Can anyone tell me what might be wrong with it and how to fix it? I’ve searched this forum but turned up nothing.
PS I have an old Thinkpad 600E running Windows 95 that I use to run several legacy programs like QuarkXpress whose current versions I can’t afford to purchase today. The Windows 95 OS running on it doesn’t support USB, so I installed a driver I found online to make the Thinkpad’s USB port work via DOS, and I used the Cruzer Glide to move files between that Thinkpad and other computers, with no problems. I mention this because it might be important-- it might’ve changed something on the Glide; I remember the DOS USB port recognized the Glide, but not my Cruzer Facet.
It’s very possible your DOS USB driver supports FAT16 and not FAT32.
If you can read the files on the drive I suggest backing them up to a hard drive while you still can, then see if you can run Windows CHKDSK on the USB drive. If that fixes the problem, great. If not you may have to format the drive. Whether in Windows or OSx I don’t know. You’re limited to whatever the Windows 95 machine will support. Personally I’d be suprised if it supposes anything over 8 GB.
If your DOS USB driver is the NOVAC one, DI1000DD.SYS, it only supports the FAT16 format!
If your USB drive is formated with FAT32, which a new Sandisk drive will be, it will show nothing when you type DIR,
and when you try to FORMAT it, the PC will crash!
As I said before, back up your files while you can.
I’ve never had a problem exchanging files between Windows 95 (Thinkpad), Windows XP (which my PC runs) and Mac OSX 10.4.11 (on my Mac) with this Cruzer Glide, so I think the file system (whether FAT 16 or FAT 32) is really irrelevant.
The problem is that suddenly now both the PC and the Mac see the 64GB Cruzer Glide as full, when there really is less than 5GB in it (yes, I can read all the 5GB files, also the hidden dot files created by the Mac, which show up when I explore the Glide with Windows XP, and yes, the first thing I did when I noticed he problem is I backed up all 5GB).
I guessed that a reformat would end up being the solution, but before I do that, I wanted to ask if anyone could tell me what caused the problem in the first place. Perhaps it’s something I can eliminate so that I don’t have to solve it again and again. Any ideas?
Ed, thanks again for your help and support!
PS Forgot to answer your questions: (1) yes, I did run CHKDSK on the Glide and CHKDSK reported it found some errors and fixed them. Still shows up as full, though. (2) I no longer remember the name of the DOS USB drive I installed, but it was the one created by Panasonic (the Japanese company). I think it was called USBAPI or something like that. I can check if you think it’s important.
Well, all 3 systems are reading, and updating, a common FAT on the USB drive and the Win 95 one most definitely can’t handle a 64 GB drive. What does a DOS DIR command show for the drive? Do any hidden files show up with a DOS ATTRIB command?
But you did say it hadn’t been used in a while. Maybe a contact on the drive got oxidized. A little dusting of the contacts with some emory paper may help.
