nixCraft

I have a 16gb Sandisk Cruzer that I use for work and home. I have removed U3 using the included removal utility. Both at work and home I have a mixture of Windows and Linux boxes. At work, WinXP and RHEL 5. At home, WinXP, Win 7, Fedora 10, and OpenSUSE 11. We'll call the home WinXP system "bob" for now. "Bob" is a Dell Dimension E520 (don't laugh, it was free).

The key is formated as fat. All systems can read and write to the key if it is freshly formated. If it has only been plugged into Windows systems since a format, "bob" can read and write to it. If it is attached to any of my Linux systems, even without any data written, "bob" will recognize it, but sees no content (though reporting the correct amount of space available). Any items written by "bob" in this situation will be visible to other Windows boxes, but not on the Linux systems. All other Windows boxes can still read and write to the key. All Linux boxes can still read and write after any other Windows box situations.

This failure to list data does not happen with other keys I have tested (Sandisk Cruzer 4gb, Kingston Datatravler 1 &2 gb, Memorex Mini 512mb, and Transcend 8gb)

Perhaps related, is that I also have a Sandisk Sansa View 16gb with a 4gb micro SDHC expansion. Any data written to the device (either memory location) from "bob" is not readable from any of the Linux systems; and any data written from any of the Linux systems is not readable by "bob". This is the case both using Windows file manager and the Sansa Media Converter application.

I hit a brick wall with Sandisk when I mentioned the 4gb key worked. However, the 4gb Cruzer was damaged, and this 16gb is it's replacement, so the 4gb was not tested after the issue was identified.

I appreciate any help. Please let me know if I can provide any other details.