Windows 7 - USB flash drive problems

first i have to say i'm sorry if this has been asked before, i've been looking arond for a while and haven't been able to find an answer for this particular issue.

i bought a new USB flash drive, 16GB, in perfect working order. i formatted it in Windows 7 to NTFS, optimised for performance. i then tried to use it on a win xp machine, but the drive won't even start. is there no way of making it work? i'd rather not lose the data on it, but if needed i will reformat it to FAT32 under Windows 7, if that will make it work under XP also. but i would really like another solution to this problem.

Thanks for any input.

XP also uses NTFS so it should work....have you tried a different USB port?

yep, tried all ports on 2 different computers running xp. same result, like i never plugged in anything. note that the same usb flash was working on these xp machines before i had formatted it using 7.

If the Windows Seven machine can read it, save the data to it, and reformat to FAT32......As a alternative, when you reformat to NTFS leave it unoptimized.....

tried it with fat32, it seems to work fine, i'll make some more tests on other machines running xp - it may actually be the machine's fault and not the OS. will return in a day or two with details.

sure enough, the drive works perfectly well in NTFS on other XP machines except the two i actually needed. so i guess this makes the topic a non-issue.