USB Flash drive Partition

[thegisguy]

My wife has a 2GB Staples USB flash drive she transfers files from one computer at work to another. Things were ok till one of the computers was replaced with a new one. The new system is running Vista. Now she can only use the drive on that Vista computer. When it is plugged into an XP Pro box it says the drive needs to be formatted. Formatting fails, because the drive has no partition. If I use XP's Disk Management utility I can create a partition, then format the drive. However the next time the thing gets plugged into the Vista system it gets messed up again.

Is the USB drive just Bad, or is Vista upgrading the FAT partition or something? I've not used Vista yet, so I know very little about it.

Thanks in advance.

 

[phisrow]

http://forums.anandtech.com/me...id=34&threadid=2226512 seem to be having some similar issues, so this looks like a vista thing.

One thing to be aware of is that Vista ships with MS's "exFat" filesystem, which is supposed to be the new hotness and all; but is Vista specific. Check to make sure that Vista isn't formatting the drive to exFat.