Mac Won't Find Flash Drive

[JayC]

Last night I tried to access/transfer files on a flash to my MacBook Air, with no joy. The Mac won't even see the USB flash drive.
I boot up the pc and voila, flash drive access box pops up. Back to Mac, can't even see it. When I pull the flash drive a pop up warns me to that it wasn't ejected properly.

How can you eject what you can't see?

I'm not alone either! I did a GS and came up with this , seemingly still unresolved.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5445969

Anybody got a cure/advice for this?

 

[Fluffmeister]

Has the USB key got any security on it, you didn't bitlocker it did you?

Could stick the data on the PC, format the flash drive on the Mac as Fat32 (which Mac's support iirc) and then you can flick it between the 2. Macs don't like NTFS, if it's a big USB stick then Windows may well have defaulted to NTFS when it was formatted.

Did you ever grab office BTW?

 

[JayC]

It's a 1GB flash with data that already exists on the PC so I'll try the format approach.

Office sits in my Dropbox still , well, I guess it does, I haven't looked since initially receiving it and realising that Mac Pages will do all I need it to do, which I think I mentioned to you at the time?

My PC has become close to redundant and so unless, for whatever reason, I buy another PC then Office will stay put in DB.

Cheers Fluff!

 

[stolzy]

I'm guessing the drive is formatted NTFS. However, unless your mac is quite old it should still be able to read an NTFS partition.

 

[JayC]

Mac is 2014 model , Air.

 

[stolzy]

That's odd. Can it read a msdos formatted usb drive?

 

[RedRick Esq.]

Have you by any chance customised the finder side bar so it does not show everything ?

Open finder and then select preferences and see whats ticked or not and there should be a devices section that is selectable to show connected devices in the side bar

 

[JayC]

Following the instructions of Fluffmeister , and after noting that the flash drive was formatted to FAT (default) on the PC, I have now changed this to FAT32 (whilst still on PC), problem solved.