Make Readable on WinXP Computers?

After formatting a USB drive with NTFS on my MBP, everything was fine while connected to a Mac. However, when that drive was connected to a Windows XP machine, the drive was seen as "unformatted." This occurred on all the XP machines I tried. On a Windows 7 machine, the drive was declared damaged.

I then tried the same things with two more flash drives. Same result. So... Is there a way to format these flash drives as NTFS on a Mac in a way that also can be read/written on Windows machines? By the way, I use Disk Utility to do the formatting.

Thanks!

mike

 

Hello mwfanelli!
Try to re-download the product and re-install it. There was a serious bug in 7.0.4 version. Write here about results...

 

The NTFS for Mac product is currently at 7.0.3. That is what I downloaded and installed less than a week ago from the Paragon web store. There is no mention of a new version that I can find.

 

Connect to a PC, format using a PC, and that should work both ways.
Right-click 'My Computer' > Manage > Disk Management > right-click the flash drive partition > format.

 

Actually, that only works on an XP machine. Once formatted on the Mac, neither Vista nor Windows 7 can do anything with it. However, I was given good advice that allows the flash drive to be formatted on the Mac and read by a PC.

The guy at the Genius Bar at the Apple store knew the answer right away: in Disk Utility, there is an "Options" button. Before formatting, press the button and choose the MS-DOS boot method rather than the default Mac GUID. You then format as usual.

The default is to format in MS-DOS (or NTFS) but use Mac GUID. Dumb, but true. Changing this to the MS-DOS method makes all the flash drives readable in either MS-DOS or NTFS format on all PCs.

You might want to put that in the README or something! It was painful to get this information.

Thanks for trying guys!
.

 

Hello Mwfanelli,

Thank you for that invaluable information. I'm sure many other users will find this helpful.