I have a 64GB sandisk ultra flash drive and I am having issues getting various windows 7 machines to actually see the full size of the drive. When I plug the drive into various Mac computers they see the drive in its full capacity fine. I reformatted the drive to MS-DOS (FAT) using a Mac and the drive is perfectly fine on the Mac OS operating system as well as on the Windows 10 operation system.
Below you will find the images display what I am talking about. The second image show what the drive is displaying on windows 7 right after I format to FAT on Mac. The third image is displaying what happens after I format to FAT on windows.
Is this just a issue for windows 7? And if so is there a solution in order to fix this?
One image shows a File System as FAT32, the other shows a FIle System as FAT. Not the same thing.
One image shows a Used Space of 512 bytes the other shows 0 bytes (no MBR/Partition table). Not the same thing.
Use whatever format works on all the devices you want to use it with. Personally I would stick with the Windows formated one. And depending on what size files you intend to write on the drive an exFAT format might be better.
I had exactly the same problem with Windows 8, and found a fix.
Windows 8 (and 7 it seems) has an issue with reading USB drives formatted in FAT, FAT32, or exFAT by OS X, and also cannot reformat USB drives formatted by OS X to their full capacity. Windows’ Disk Management app could not even repartition the USB drive correctly.
A SanDisk supprt page for an unrelated Windows 7 formatting problem reccomended to use an application called “HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool.” I used this application on the Windows 8 computer that could not properly format my USB drive and it quicky fixed the problem, back to 64 GB from 200 MB.
A search for the application will turn up several sites where it can be downloaded.
