Semi-Bricked USB drive....ugh

[Raz1r]

I have a PNY Attaché 512mb USB Flash drive that I bought for school. The problem is that Windows now thinks that it is an optical drive. When I try to "Explore" or "Open" it, all I get is a message that says: "Please insert a disk into Drive J:".

I've tried everything I can think of, Format, Populate drive (under properties), Eject, AutoPlay.

I think Mac OSX on the school computers is what screwed it up. But I was told that I could use it to transfer files between the OSes. What gives?

[Spawn-Inc]

from what i know you can only use w window's formatted drive with windows and mac with mac. i'm not sure if this will work but try plugging in the flash drive then click Start>right click "My computer">Manage>Disk managenment and try to format it in there. i'm not sure if it will make a difference or not but it helped me with my new hdd.

[calumc]

could be some registry values, have you tried it on another windoze machine?

[Sakker]

I use my external hdd (and several others) with both OSX and XP, along with my USB flash drive, so that should not be the problem at all. I believe OSX can run FAT and has a problem with NTFS.

[crenn]

OSX can read NTFS fine, however, it has limited writing capabilities for NTFS.

If you want to use a drive for OSX and XP, you must use the FAT system. Normally, all USB thumb drives are formatted in FAT.