The Natural Philosopher wrote on Feb 1, 2011:

Mike Lane wrote:
The Natural Philosopher wrote on Jan 31, 2011:

Mike Lane wrote:
Tim Streater wrote on Jan 30, 2011:

On the Macintosh you plug in the drive (USB, Firewire, etc, ...)
double-click on Disk Utility, select the drive, and choose what type of
file system you want installed and what partitions you want. Defaults to
HFS+ Journaled one partition, so nothing to do usually other than give
the disk a name and click Format. This is true whether the drive was
previously formatted or not.

And guess what - no drive letters.

If it's a stick and I'm likely to be sending it to a Windows user I'll
format it as FAT or ExFat (whatever that may be) as Windows users appear
to be poorly served in terms of knowing about other file systems.
The trouble with the Mac OS is that whatever the format, it leaves a
whole
lot of hidden files on any drive that it opens. This normally doesn't
matter
but I had a Garmin gps unit that totally freaked after I tried to read
its
flash card with my Mac.

fortunately, one can erase them.

Left my Nikon camera cluttered up with them all.


Yes. Formatting with anything other than a Mac will do it of course, or you
can use BlueHarvest to wipe them automatically

didn't do either. Just plugged it into linux and asked it to erase
everything beginning with a dot ;-)

Macs are vile when connected to anything but another Mac.

I wouldn't say that exactly :-)

I agree that Mac OS should clean up stuff it leaves when it finishes with a
foreign formatted drive, but OTOH any software that tries to read unknown
files and then reacts badly to them is just plain faulty (IMO of course).


--
Mike Lane
UK North Yorkshire
mike_lane at mac dot com