My brother bought a HP V210W 16GB usb stick. It wasn't recognized by his MBP 13" (2011, 2.7GHz i7, 4GB 1333MHz DDR3) running OS X 10.6.8. He then tried the stick on his Win7 PC which recognized it just fine, and formatted the stick as FAT32. It still didn't work on his MBP: didn't mount, wasn't recognized in Finder, didn't show up in Disk Utility or System Profiler.
On my MBP 13" (2009, 2.53GHz Core2Duo, 4GB 1067MHz DDR3) running OS X 10.5.8 it works fine: it gets recognized and I can access the files on it. Erased everything using Disk Utility, re-formatted as FAT32. Still doesn't work on his MBP.
Is this an issue caused by hardware (either Mac or USB stick), formatting/partitioning (FAT32), operating system (Snow Leopard vs Leopard) or something entirely different?
Thanks for your response in advance.