Home Forums Peripherals & Multimedia Peripherals Erasing & formatting thumbdrive

Kingston 4GB thumbdrive:
I tried erasing and formatting same with Disk Utility. Now there's only 3.67GB on it with 18MB of (unknown/invisible) stuff according to the info window, and it seems to have access to everything on my iMac when I double-click its icon.
It's formatted as Mac OS Extended. What's "journaled" mean?
I don't know what is or isn't on the thumbdrive, but I don't want any personal info on it. What's with it?

Hi Grelber

Just out of interest, do you look things up on the internet before asking questions here? I'm not being sarcastic, but so far all (or certainly, most) of your questions have published answers already.

For instance: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht2355

There are also explanations for hidden files on USB memory sticks/thumb drives.

You did not mention the brand name of your thumb drive, but the 18MB is probably a U3 partition. The U3 Launchpad (LaunchU3.exe) is a Windows program manager that is preinstalled on every U3 smart drive and is not removed by formatting. Download and run the U3 Launchpad Remover utility to remove the U3 partition. Then you can reformat the drive. Note: The advertised capacity of the thumb drive may be 4GB but there will inevitably be some capacity loss due to the volume structure (directories etc.) that must be on the drive before it can be used. There will also be variations in the reported size due to the binary/decimal conversion. That has always been true whether you were aware of it in OS 9 or not.

Journaling (that is a link to a Wikipedia explaining journaling) is a mechanism for maintaining the integrity of a disk drive in the event of an error or failure in writing data to the disk. You definitely want journaling turned ON.

Unless you intentionally write data to your thumb drive there is nothing personal on it.

Yep. I supplied a link to Journaling too.

Bensheim: Yes, I try to look things up. As noted the Help Center function won't give me anything (yet again). So I have to try other options to get the help/info required.
I can't access the Apple support site at the best of times and certainly not via Help Viewer; and right now everything at Apple gives an error message that they're working on the support site.

joemikeb: As noted in first post, it's a Kingston 4GB thumbdrive. If there's nothing personal on the drive, then why do the contents of my entire Macintosh HD show up when I double-click on the Kingston icon on the Desktop?!

It will take you a while to recognize the difference, but you will not find answers to many of your questions, some of those posed in this thread, by way of example, in OS X Help and must research them on the Internet.

As I once posted, a Google search appended by "(skip a single space)site:apple.com" can be an invaluable resource. (The "site:..." is not necessary, but it often helps separate the wheat from the chaff.)

The Finder window that opens after you double-click on the Kingston icon has a name at the top. What is it?

If that name is not that of the Kingston thumb drive, I suspect you may have accidentally clicked on your iMac's HD in the top left panel (aka the Sidebar) of that Finder window, changing the contents of the window to that of this HD. You can select the Kingston (which should be listed at the top left panel as well), or perhaps click on the back-arrow below the red button at the very top left. This latter option will get you to the Kingston's contents if that was the last item you looked at in that window before (inadvertently) viewing your HD's contents.

Not that I doubt your word, but I would have to see what you are talking about. It is a safe bet that unless you intentionally or unintentionally copied those files to the thumb drive they are not actually there.

As to your comment about not finding anything in the Apple help files about this are you implying Apple should account for every eventuality with every developer's hardware?

For someone who has thrown in the towel, I am glad to see you are still in there trying.

Thread closed temporarily for clean-up.

Edit: I moved the branch of replies discussing grelber's ongoing Help problem over to his "Help - Content not available" thread where they belong. Thread re-opened.