Mac formatted PC drive not showing in Windows

In the last couple of years I've managed to screw up 2 USB drives by reformatting them using my Mac. This didn't use to be the case.

Most recently, I was using a 4GB USB stick drive to copy files from a PC laptop when the laptop went into hibernation (ran out of batteries).

When it came back to life, the drive wouldn't read on the Mac I wanted to copy the files to.

I thought I'd reformat it on the Mac OS machine I have and used Disk Utility to format it as FAT32 format which should mount on a PC. It showed 4GB on my Mac but when I put it in a PC it said it needed to be formatted and would only offer to format it as 200MB. Needless to say, I was slightly"miffed".

I had a sneaking suspicion it was to do with the GUID partitioning scheme newer Macs use for disks. Some Googling later, I came upon this post by MacTalk Australia forums user Oceanic:

http://forums.mactalk.com.au/28/75333-formatting-usb-drive-mac-windows.html#post937734

which had the answer:

I have managed to do it using Disk Utility.

• Select the drive, then go to the partition section.
• Select the format as MS-DOS (FAT) (it will make this FAT32).
• Select the number of partitions (I have always selected one) in the drop-down box.
• Click on the Options button at the bottom of the partition diagram.
• Select the Master Boot Record option.

If you now apply that, it should create the drive using MBR (master boot record) rather than GUID Partition Table (GPT). Windows is incapable of reading GPT when created on a Mac. If you don't select an option, it seems to use GPT as the default, thereby rendering the drive unreadable on a Windows machine.

This worked fine and I now have a perfectly functioning PC formatted drive (Apple don't make it easy!). I've reposted it here as I spent considerable time Googling the answer and hopefully if I type enough in it will help someone else.

I'm guessing this also would have fixed another USB drive I'd bought. It was one with 2 partitions - one for security - which I didn't want. I tried to do it as 1 and it all went wrong. This may have fixed that too.

Is homoeopathy rubbish...I don't think so

There's been a campaign recently in the UK for getting homoeopathic drugs removed from pharmacies like Boots (a major high street chemist in the UK) and to generally write off homoeopathy as...well...bullshit.

I would disagree - despite being highly sceptical of just about everything (I still am a liberal, science loving geek). I don't speak as a scientist (I'm not) or from any huge research on my part - just from my experiences of the healthcare world (traditional or otherwise).

When I was a teenager, I had major sinus problems (multiple eye-watering headaches every day) and went to doctors numerous times. They gave me lots of drugs - which, if the placebo effect (and the above campaign claims homoeopathic successes are just placebo based) was to be considered, should have "cured" me. It didn't - zero effect.

I went to a homoeopath - and despite being sceptical, what he gave me worked. He thought something (weedkiller - common on roadsides in NZ where I'm from) had been effecting my sinuses and gave me homoeopathic amounts of it for my system to accept (initially that made me think that was bad but the same applies to normal inoculations and is just as scary as taking "good bacteria" for the stomach). This made the headaches go away ...until the next time someone sprayed their weeds.

However, another type of practitioner probably regarded as a hippie - a naturopath - said that my immune system was in a poor state (something the doctors nor the homoeopath saw - no, I have never been a big drinker) and put me on a course of simple off-the-shelf vitamins and minerals (some you'd recognise from detoxing - which is also regarded as "bad science") and some basic good advice. Again sceptical - result, not one headache in over a year (until I diverged from the advice). Yes, I went back to following the simple advice very quickly!

Compared:

• doctors - result: no change, still had the headaches.
• homoeopath: got rid of the headaches as they arose but was still liable to get them.
• naturopath: got rid of headaches in a more permanent way.

That said, I would still go to doctors for other things (although now, I'm mostly healthy) and like in every "profession" (doctors, homoeopaths, naturopaths, or any other) there are good, bad, well meaning but useless, and dangerous practitioners. Like in all professions, being able to "dot the i's and cross the t's" also doesn't make you good at your job too but it would be good if there was some decently accepted certification for natural health practitioners.

As part of this campaign mentioned above there was a joke homoeopathic mass overdose yesterday.As for overdosing on homoeopathic pills - when something is watered down to 1/10000 strength, that is going to take eating a LOT of pills to "dose" let alone overdose and even then, a lot of commonly available homoeopathic pills are just "cleansers". Hardly scientific there. And when you see pharmaceutical companies looking into every second crackpot idea/old wive's tale for ideas so they can give doctors the next "scientific" cure - well, again, hardly a victory for modern science.

If a cure works, good, if it doesn't, bad - and for every dangerous crackpot there'll be plenty of failed pharmaceutical trials and many successful pharmaceutical drugs that have very dangerous side effects.