Ask DACS
February 2008

Jim Scheef, Moderator
Lisa Leifels, Reporter

We welcome questions from the floor at the start of our General Meetings. In addition, members who are not able to attend the General Meeting may submit questions to askdacs@dacs.org. We will ask the question for you and post the reply in DACS.ORG. Please provide as much information as possible since we can’t probe during the session.

Q. I just bought a new 8 GB Toshiba flash drive, which gave me errors when I ran the Disk Utility on my Mac computer. Can the FAT32 file format use the entire drive?

A. Yes, the FAT32 file format can use all 8 GB of space as long as the data being stored doesn’t contain a file larger than 4 GB. The FAT32 file system has a 4 GB limit for the size of one file that it can save. This means that any attempt to save a file that is larger than 4 GB will be met with an error message of ‘Disk is full’ or ‘Not enough space’ even though the drive may have a large amount of space still available. The NTFS file system is recommended for large volumes, however the Mac OS X can only read files in this format and cannot write to them. You could format the drive in HFS+ format, but you will not be able to use the drive with a Windows computer.

If you would like to use the drive with both a Mac and Windows computer then you may want to use the disk utility to format half the drive in FAT32 and the other half in the HFS+ format.

Q. I am using a Power Mac G5, when I use the DVD drive it says that I need to use the –R format.

A. Go to the apple.com/support website and you can cross reference what model G5 you have with the disk formats that are supported. You may be trying to use an erasable and re-recordable DVD+RW disc, but your DVD recorder is only compatible with a DVD-R disk.

Q. How come when I put my Apple laptop to sleep by clicking on the sleep function, it wakes up again 20-30 seconds later?

A. The Power management options in laptops frequently create problems for people. Sleep mode is a low power, energy-saving feature that offers both environmental and economic benefits, as well as helping to extend the life of batteries and displays.

Some of the reasons why your laptop may not stay asleep include applications that are running and using the hard drive, Spotlight may be indexing content, other possible disruptions include sharing printers, files or an internet connection. Some PCI Expansion cards prevent any kind of sleep mode.

Here are some ideas you can try. You can try turning off file sharing if it isn’t being used. Check that the Bluetooth System preferences for Bluetooth devices aren’t set to wake up the computer. Try removing your USB and Firewire devices one by one to narrow down which one may be the culprit. If you can hear your hard drive spinning you may want to try booting up in safe mode to isolate a software issue. You should also verify that your computer and display energy saving settings are not set to Never.

If you don’t have any luck with any of the above you may need to reset the Power Management Unit (PMU).

Submit any question to: askdacs@dacs.org.