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I have a SanDisk Cruser drive that was formatted for a Mac and now I want to use it for a PC (and I don't have access to the Mac. What can I do?

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3 Answers

up vote 11 down vote accepted

Assuming Vista or 7 (think this works on XP, but I'm not sure) and that the disk is not showing up under My Computer at all:

  1. Connect your disk.
  2. Run cmd as an Administrator.
  3. Run diskpart.exe. Use ? if you need help in this program.
  4. list disk
  5. Find the disk that corresponds to your USB disk. select disk n where n is the number of the disk. Confirm that you're using the right disk with detail disk.
  6. clean (Warning: This command erases the disk's partition information)
  7. create partition primary. No size is needed if you want to use the whole disk
  8. active. Marks the partition as potentially bootable.
  9. format fs=fat32 quick. You can choose NTFS instead of FAT32 if you want.
  10. assign. Assigns the disk a drive letter.
  11. exit to quit.
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Didn't know about diskpart.exe . . . gotta try that now! – tooshel Apr 24 '11 at 18:50
It worked! Is there a way to do that in the GUI? Is that the same as using "Disk Management"? – tooshel Apr 27 '11 at 4:41
You can do a lot of it in Disk Management, but I'm used to diskpart now. Finding exactly what you have to click on to get the menu you want in Disk Management can be irritating, and I've found sometimes it doesn't display non-Windows formatted disks correctly. Diskpart just always seems to work. – Bacon Bits Apr 27 '11 at 14:03
up vote 0 down vote

Plug it into the PC. When it shows up under "My Computer" right-click on it and choose Format.

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Tried that before I posted here and it does nothing. – tooshel Apr 24 '11 at 18:50
I tried the "diskpart" advice from Bacon Bits and when I got to the "clean" command the format disk screen popped up and I got permission denied in diskpart. It was strange. But then the "windows format" failed anyway and I tried the "clean" again in diskpart and it worked. Right now it's formatting using diskpart. – tooshel Apr 24 '11 at 18:54
up vote 0 down vote

Trying the other top answer, I received a "Windows was unable to complete the format" error. So for anyone getting the same, I found another solution.

  • Right click on "My Computer" and select "Manage".
  • Under "Storage" select "Disk Management".
  • In the lower right hand window, you should see the drive you're trying to format.
  • Right click on the volume and select the "Simple Volume Wizard".
  • Pick the format there and the wizard formats the disk without errors.
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