I've got two different USB flash drives which are formatted MS-DOS(FAT-16). When I plug each into my MacBook Pro (running MacOS 10.6 – Snow Leopard), they don't mount. I can see them using Disk Utility. When I run an Ubuntu VM inside of VMWare Fusion, Ubuntu has no trouble mounting these either.
I've tested with the drives plugged directly into the machine and plugged into a usb hub — both give the same results.
Is there a setting I've inadvertently set which disables automounting? Is there an issue with mounting FAT-16 drives?
Best Answer
How large is the drive/partition? FAT16 can go as high as 4GB, but (according to Wikipedia) is "not widely supported". XP supports it, but earlier versions of Windows do not: they use the more conservative 2GB limit. Perhaps Mac OS X is also 2GB. (Not a surprise that Linux might support 4GB.) For more than 2GB, use FAT32.
I happen to have a 128MB stick with FAT16, and it mounted fine with Leopard (don't have Snow handy here).
In Disk Utility, what happens if you manually try to Mount the partition; or is it disabled?