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Well it all started with discovering a USB port or two on the side of my HDTV (Samsung LN40B630 40" LCD, I highly recommend it). I put a few .avi files on my 4GB usb flash drive, but the TV couldn't read the drive for some reason. I realized it was because I have all my USB flash drives formatted for OS X, so I used Disk Utility to change it back to FAT32 format. It worked like a charm, I watched the Avatar trailer and Tron Legacy trailer in 1080p without any problems.
Figuring I'd hit the jackpot, I grabbed my 16GB USB flash drive and similarly switched it over to FAT32, but then I found I couldn't move my full-length 1080p movies onto it for some reason. Because I'm of the Mac people, I was unaware that FAT32 allows files only up to 4GB (minus 1B), so my 14GB .mkv file was out of the question. I posted a thread asking what the possible way around this might be, and Cynth mentioned the newer NTFS format, which doesn't have the 4GB file-size restriction.
I grabbed the 16GB USB flash drive, recently reformatted to FAT32 on my Mac, and plugged it into my laptop running Vista. I tried reformatting it under Vista, but it could only see a 200MB partition. So I made this thread.
Fast forward to now, and I think I figured out what happened. When you reformat to FAT32 on Mac, it doesn't necessarily reformat the entire drive, it just makes a big-ass partition. The leftovers of the partition, in my case about 200MB, is the only thing that a Vista (XP and also Windows 7, I've checked) can see. I had a friend of mine come over and check it out, and according to him (he's the Windows nerd to my Mac nerd), the drive is double-partitioned for good.
The "fix" is to go buy a new 16GB drive and format it to NTFS on a Windows machine, making sure to never try and format the drive on a Mac. I have NFTS-3G, the application for Mac that allows me to read and write NFTS formatted drives, so after I get back from Best Buy or wherever tomorrow and format it correctly, it should work just fine.
I hope.
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