USB flash drive not mounting on Mac and Windows but works on Crunchbang

Question

I've been using a PNY 16GB USB stick for some time now, no problems. Recently there have been messages when I'm using on windows 8 to "repair the drive," but I always skipped it. Recently I clicked the repair button, it finished with no problems. However, after I removed the drive it would not mount on windows again. When I tried to mount the drive on a Macbook, it did not work. I then tried to mount it on Crunchbang Waldorf, and it worked with no problems. Would the simplest solution be to back up my data and reformat the drive, or is there a different way?

Answer 1

Mount the drive on CrunchBang and copy the data you want saved onto a different drive.

Then, establish what your stick is. It'll probably be sda1 - but check anyway by looking at the results of the following command (you need to be root to do this):

fdisk -l

Assuming it is sda1, you'll need to unmount the flash disk, so:

umount /dev/sda1

Once done, enter the following command to format the flash device to FAT32

mkdosfs -F 32 -I /dev/sda1

If you're not comfortable with the command line, you could always fire up GParted. If it's not installed, sudo apt-get install gparted should do the trick.