write to it (except for folder creation: weird!). I thought perhaps the admins
had decided to disable writing to USB devices, but that's contrary to company
policy in which they always tell us to save e-mail attachments to external
disks to save server space. So I knew it couldn't be that. I even checked
the Registry setting that disables writing to USB devices but it wasn't set.
So, yeah, it was weird. One week I could write to it; the next, nothing.
If I right-clicked a folder in it and selected "New Text Document" I would
get a message saying writing is disabled (or something). Same for any
other file type. However, I could right-click and create new folders.
To cut a long story short, I found out later that the stick had no permissions
to write to it. That led me to surmise that because I recently reformatted it
as NTFS, that that format was the problem. So I got home and reformatted
it as FAT32 (because I couldn't even format it at work) and when I took it in
the next day, yep, you guessed it, I could write to it again!
The moral of the story: if you need your portable stick to work on ANY PC
with no issues, DON'T use NTFS! You'll never know when it'll fail on you due
to permissions. NTFS is just a little too powerful for its own good. Stick with
FAT32 for guaranteed compatibility (and it also means you can use it on a
Win 98/ME PC, if you ever encounter such a situation, such as when you
visit Granny to install the latest virus-checking app on her ancient PC).
