Lock a USB Drive with 10.6.8

Hello, I have an original MacBook1,1 running Snow Leopard 10.6.8. I would like to password protect my USB Drive. I have heard of OS X Lion being able to password protect USB Drives but I cannot upgrade to Lion, only 10.6.8, which I'm sure you know. I have seen many apps on the Mac App Store, but none are compatible with my MacBook. (Because of my OS and 32-bit. processor.) I want the password to come up automatically when you plug in the USB Drive. Or I would like to have the password come up when you try to open up the USB Drive. I do NOT want to have one that copies something onto the USB Drive that you can put stuff in. I know that must sound very wordy. Thank you in advance.

There may be some security options in OS X Disk Utility, but to
avoid a File Vault if possible should you forget the password;
and usually a bootable full running OS X could have Security
settings in System Preferences engaged, not an external file.
You may be able to encrypt the entire content, not sure how
because after hearing horror stories of lost access to very
important files or drives, or partitions, I've not bothered; as
a single user there are other ways to lose file access that do
not involve setting up these concepts. Backups to secure a
working copy of ones archive and to have a bootable clone
are better goals to overcome other kinds of loss.
Physical access to the computer and media are the first level
of security; then passwords, then encryption, as/when needed.
While they likely do not provide a simple path to your needs
the security guides in .PDF download document form, from
Apple Support may be helpful as they cover Mac OS X 10.3
through 10.6.8.
•Security Configuration Guides - Apple Support
(Mac OS X: 10.3/10.4/10.5/10.6)
https://ssl.apple.com/support/security/guides/
Hopefully you can find a workable security measure for use
with a USB flash drive to password protect its content.
Good luck & happy computing!

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Cannot mount external USB drive with FDisk_partition_scheme

Due to some recent mac issues in my lab, we updated one of the computers to Maverick 10.9.4 from Snow Leopard 10.6.8 yesterday. Anyhow, this seems to have erased the ability of the mac to read or mount several identical USB drives with the NTFS format (WD My Passport Ultra 500GB USB3.0). It could do it yesterday when it was OSX 10.6.8, but not today (OSX 10.9.4). The drives still work fine on other OSX 10.6.8, Windows 8.1 and Ubuntu 14.04 computers (this is appears to be a problem with the Maverick 10.9.4 operating system itself, rather than the flash drives which work flawlessly with every other computer I've tried). I want to remove data from the computer to create backups on the USB drives (no, I don't want to create an online backup or buy a new set of USB drives).
diskutil can see the drives, but cannot verify or repair them as they lack a GUID (GPT) partition scheme. I'm assuming this is the root of the problem. Manually mounting the drives does not work. Installing the ntfs-3g driver also did not work (I was using this to write to the NTFS drives until we upgraded OS's). Installing the WD Passport drivers for OSX also did not work. How do I get the mac to mount these drives?
I could reformat one USB drive and then copy to the others, but this would be extremely inconvenient and take days of copying files back and forth (and would prefer to fix the mac rather than go through this with every NTFS drive I own). If I did this, the FAT32 hard drive format would not be suitable, as format is unable to handle the extremely large sequencing datasets I need to transfer. I'm not super familiar with hard drive formats, but in the event we cannot get Maverick to actually work could someone possibly suggest a format able to handle large file sizes (the largest file I need to move is ~60GB) and be compatible with Windows 8.1 / OSX 10.9.4 / Ubuntu 14.04 as well?
Another workaround I thought of would be just to install an Ubuntu partition on the mac and get the files off through the Linux install. Which is also inconvenient, but would probably be faster than trying to reformat the drives and copy everything over onto them again given the amount of data I want to transfer.
Unrelated, but is there any way to view files and folders in the OSX root directory besides through Terminal? It seems like this functionality was also removed when we "upgraded" from Snow Leopard. (At this point, if it were up to me I would wipe all of the macs we own and replace them with Ubuntu... even the most minor of tasks always require some sort of workaround with them... at my wits end here ).

Yeah this definitely appears to be a problem specifically with this mac. It's been having all sorts of weird problems lately, and we figured that upgrading to Maverick might fix them (but instead we got new problems).
To give an update on this, I ended up reformatting one of the drives to HFS+ and disabled journaling. It now recognizes the drive again, and I'm pulling the files off that way. I looked at exFAT, but it looks like HFS+ has much better Linux support (Windows is read-only but that's only a minor annoyance, as the algorithms to process the data only run on UNIX machines anyways). It's a shame I couldn't keep using NTFS (had to copy over literally EVERYTHING again...) but whatever. Again, no solution for the issue (where this mac can't read NTFS drives).
@rkaufmann87 - To give a bit more explanation, we recently had to disable online backups because apparently the sheer amount of data causes Time Machine to freeze the computer and fail every time it has a scheduled backup (original issue we thought that upgrading to Maverick would solve... didn't work). The hard drive has been having a lot of issues when it begins to reach max capacity as well. So I am pulling off all of my files to external hard drives and deleting the local copy before we attempt to back up online again. And the data would probably take me a year and a lot of money to recreate (for the curious, it's high throughput sequencing data). I'm choosing not to take any chances as a result.

HT1948 USB drive with install image is showing in Startup Manager on a Mac Pro, but wont boot. Showing circle with cross strip, and shut down automatically. USB device are made and work on two different MacBook Pro, but used on Mac Pro. Any help?

USB drive with install image is showing in Startup Manager on a Mac Pro, but wont boot. Showing circle with cross strip, and shut down automatically. USB device are made and work on two different MacBook Pro, but used on Mac Pro. Any help?

OS X installers have always been fairly specific, hardware-wise. I haven't read anything reflecting that situation with the Recovery HD, so it may be that the Recovery HD created for the MacBook Pro does not have the necessary drivers for the Mac Pro. Obviously, nothing definitive here, but a possibility.

Can I use a USB drive with the Airport extreme (not the new one) for Time Machine?

I thought I heard that using USB drive for Time Machine over wifi will work with the new, tall Airport Extreme, but not with the previous model, which I have. Anybody know for sure?
thanks.

It is not recommended.. Apple says it doesn't work.. for some people it does for others it is unreliable.. do you really want unreliable backups.
See http://pondini.org/TM/Airport.html

Is it possible to format an external USB drive with XFS or EXT3 ?

Greetings all.
I am running a 2,8Ghz 8x core with 6Gb ram. I have a NAS, (Buffalo Pro Duo Linkstation) which has a built in linux which saves data using XFS (I think). It has a built in backup routine, but the drive it backs up to MUST be in XFS or EXT3 (Fat 32 works but it drops all files over 2GB ;( ... ) So - here's my question:
How can I format the external USB drive (A seagate freeagent) in XFS or EXT3 so that it can run on my Buffalo? My preference is to use a GUI mac program (does one exist?) or to use a command line UNIX command (FSK? - but then, how????). I could also use (GASP!) a windows utility on parallels, or even install a linux distro via parallels. But it should be easy I hope...
Looking forward to any ideas/thoughts, tips, etc.
thanks and best to all from Berlin,
Jason

Download a "Live CD" (one you can boot of into running copy of Linux without having to install anything; for example, [OpenSUSE Live CD|http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.0/iso/cd/openSUSE-11.0-GNOME-Li veCD-x86_64.iso]).
Use OS X' Disk Utility to burn it to a CD.
Insert the CD you just burned (if it ejected afterwards), and then restart your Mac.
Hold down the 'C' key on the keyboard as the Mac boots, and it should switch to booting off the CD. Once the CD starts loading, you can let go. It will take a couple of minutes, but it will eventually boot into Linux.
Attach your USB drive.
Run gparted (you need to search the menus for it, it's under system administration, I think -- or you can open up a terminal window and simply type 'gparted').
Find your disk (/dev/sdb or /dev/sda) and partition and format it using the filesystem you want.
When done, restart the computer. You'll boot back into Mac OS X and have an EXT2/EXT3/XFS formatted external drive (that OS X won't recognize, by the way).

Mapping usb drive with rdesktop to windows server/XP

I have read that the -r option with rdesktop allows you to map a local usb drive on a linux pc to a windows server or XP as follows:
rdesktop -r disk:usb=<path> <ipaddress>
I have arch installed with a base gnome so that usb drives are automatically mounted and unmounted when plugged in.
Locally I have made sure that the usb is being mounted properly.
But when I rdesktop into the windows pc and open windows explorer the usb drive appears as a network drive in the left window but no files appear in the right hand window.
Windows gives me a message that the resource is unavailable. Mu usb is formatted in FAT.
This occurs whether I use the dev address (/dev/sda1) for my usb drive or the mounted address (/media/usbstick) in the -r option.
Can anyone tell me why I am not seeing any files in windows on my usb stick?

There are a number of posts related to copying issues between Windows Vista / 7 and AirPort Disks. Two potential solutions being forwarded are: 1) Changing the LAN Manager authentication level, and/or 2) Disabling the Windows Search feature.
To change the LAN Manager authentication level:
From the Windows Vista / 7 desktop, click Start
Search for: security
Click 'Local Security Policy'
Goto Local Policies > Security Options
Under Policy, double-click 'Network security: LAN Manager authentication level'
Change level to: Send LM & NTLM responses
Under Policy, double-click 'Network security: Minimum session security for NTLM SSP based (including RPC) clients'
De-select 'Require 128-bit encryption'
Click OK
To disable Windows Search:
Start > Control Panel > Programs > Programs & Features
On the right-hand side, click "Turn Windows features on/off"
Scroll down, and de-select "Windows Search".
Press OK, close all windows and restart.
A third "solution," that has worked for me, is verify that both the AirPort base station and the Win7 PC are using the exact same Workgroup Name. In my case, I use "WORKGROUP" (without the quote marks) for this name. From the AirPort Utility, you would enter this value on the Disks > File Sharing tab. On Win7, Start > Control Panel > System and Security > System > Change Settings > Change > Workgroup

BackUp Server Volume to local USB Drive with TM, HowToDo?

Hello
I read in many threads that people want to backup their local drive to a server. I want to do the reverse. I want to backup one of the shared volumes to a local USB drive by using Time Machine?
How can I configure this. The Server Volume is not recognised by Time Machine.
Please tell me how I can manipulate this?
Regards
Gérard

Gerard Dirks wrote:
The Volumes on the OS X Server are all formatted as HFS+ Extended (Journaled)
What is wrong with that??
Nothing, if you run TM *on the server,* where they're either internal or directly-attached via F/W or USB.
But can't run TM *on a remote Mac* to back-up those drives.

Attempting to install Windows 7 from USB drive keep receiving "No Bootable device -- insert boot disk and press any key" usb drive with windows 7 iso is inserted

As the topic says, i am trying to install windows from a usb drive, when i click install windows and the computer reboots to install a black screen comes up with "no bootable device -- insert boot disk and press any key" the USB drive is inserted and pressing any key does nothing. Help?

You need to follow these guides to install from USB drive
http://www.intowindows.com/how-to-install-windows-7vista-from-usb-drive-detailed -100-working-guide/
good luck

Random crashes when using USB drive with Creatie Suite

I have a 24" Intel IMAC and when using a SanDisk Cruzer Titanium 2GB and Creative Suite I eperience random crashes in CS. When I remove th drive it works fine, any known issues when using Rosetta apps and USB drives?
thanks

So a guy goes into his doctors office and tells his doctor "Ya gotta
help me doc...it hurts when I run my head into the door like
this...OW!". Then the doctor says:
"DON'T DO THAT ANY MORE!!!"
(I promise to keep my day job...oops what job...and not go into
comedy..)
Why don't you convert all the old 16 bit code into 32 bit code and
create one application where the various parts all know about each
other? I don't think that there's any way to coordinate an old 16 bit
LV and a new 32 bit LV application so that they don't step on each
other driverwise like they appear to be doing. I don't think that the
two LabVIEW's even know that the other exists!
Alternatively, get a second computer to run the 16 bit code on and
make the two apps communicate with
each other using TCP/IP or serial.
Doug De Clue
[email protected]
cincidude wrote in message news:<[email protected]>...
> I am using 2 versions of Labview at the same time, one is version 4
> which has a camera and a weigh-in-motion scale attached to it. The
> second is either Labview version 4, 16-bit or Labview 3.0.1, 16-bit,
> i'm not sure. The sixteen bit has a data acquisition system attached
> to it. Its an optim electronics system and the 16-bit Labview drivers
> for the optim were provided by Optim electronics and so I am stuck
> with using the same system. When I use both these systems in tandem,
> the system crashes frequently, but both systems run fine
> independently. It usually just freezes up or says "Illegal operation
> performed. Contact program vendor". Its a windows error with a red
> cross.

Duplicate USB Drives With Automator or AS?

Hello,
I'm wondering if anyone knows of a way that I could connect several USB drives into a hub, have Automator copy certain files to each of them, then eject them (and maybe a notification from Growl would be nice. . . but not necessary ). Does anyone here have an idea how to accomplish this?
Thanks,
Lawrence

Ah, yeah, automator... a system to make the world easier by being painfully obtuse. yeeee...
try this. copy the following into the AppleScript editor, modify it with the appropriate details, save it as a script, then attach it as a folder action to /Volumes (that I know you can do - this is just a pared-down version of my own folder action).
property masterFolder : "hd:users:yourname:path:to:master folder"
on adding folder items to thisFolder after receiving theseThings
          set workingVolumes to {}
          repeat with thisItem in theseThings
                    tell application "Finder"
                              if kind of thisItem is "volume" and ejectable of thisItem is true then
                                        copy disk thisItem to end of workingVolumes
                                        set theFiles to every item of folder masterFolder
duplicate theFiles to thisItem
                              end if
                    end tell
          end repeat
delay 10
-- you could probably work out a more elegant way of testing whether the files are finished copying, but for now...
          tell application "Finder" to eject workingVolumes
end adding folder items to
Eventually you'll want to find a more precise specifier - this will copy the files to any ejectable drive you mount on the system that can be written to - but it's a start.

Any issue using Time Machine on USB drive with AirPort?

Are there any issues using a USB drive attached to an AirPort Extreme with Time Machine? My guess is no, but figured I would ping the forum and see if there's something I have not thought of. I know Time Capsule does this, but I don't have that - I have an AirPort Extreme.
The drive is within my network and not exposed to anyone unless they can connect
My password is required to access the Time Machine files
Any security implications not covered by these two points?
I'm currently using a USB drive I attach/detach from my MacBook Air and it would be much more convenient to backup to the drive connected to the AirPort. The first backup will probably take a day short of forever being over the air and not the wire, but after that I imagine it would nicely run in the background.
Thanks for any feedback or suggestions!

Are there any issues using a USB drive attached to an AirPort Extreme with Time Machine? My guess is no, but figured I would ping the forum and see if there's something I have not thought of.
The correct answer is yes. First off, Apple does NOT support Time Machine backups to external USB HDDs attached to the AirPort Extreme ... although they do for the Time Capsule.
Please check out this excellent Pondini article which provides some details on why this would not be a good idea.

Full 1gb usb drive with space available

Have a 1gb USB drive that indicates 731 MB available but getting "no free disk space" messge when I try to copy 2mb jpg pictures.
This is information from Disk utility when I did a verify and repair on this drive
Verifying volume “MyDrive”
Checking file system** /dev/disk2s1
** Phase 1 - Preparing FAT
** Phase 2 - Checking Directories
** Phase 3 - Checking for Orphan Clusters
427 files, 714656 KiB free (44666 clusters)
Verify and Repair volume “MyDrive”
Checking file system** /dev/disk2s1
** Phase 1 - Preparing FAT
** Phase 2 - Checking Directories
** Phase 3 - Checking for Orphan Clusters
444 files, 714272 KiB free (44642 clusters)
Volume repair complete.Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required.
Thanks for any response.

Despite being formatted FAT there shouldn't be that kind of overhead. I have several FAT formatted flash drives and they work perfectly well with only nominal formatting overhead subtracting from the nominal 1 GB (I think 960-something MB free). The only difference is I use these and formatted them with Tiger.

External USB drive with 3000 N100

Hi,
Good to be here - first post!
Needing more capacity I bought a Seagate FreeAgent Go 2.5 inch 120GB drive that draws its power from the computer using two USB ports.
I could not get this to work at all - it seemed be a hardware issue with the drive: it made a bleeping sound and was not detected by the computer. It also seriously upset the Lenovo and I had to do a hard reboot by disconnecting the battery, after which it ran normally (but the Seagate still didn't work at all).
I then connected the Seagate to my desktop PC with the same (negative) result.
So, was the Seagate dead from the word go? Or was there a power issue with the Lenovo that killed it?
I've checked that my Lenovo has the latest BIOS, and all its WinXP Pro updates are up to date. What success, or otherwise, have others had with portable external drives with the 3000 N100?
Best wishes

Thanks to all for their suggestions. The final outcome was a bit of a surprise - it works! Depending upon which USB ports you plug into (this drive, like many other portable ones) uses two USB ports to supply extra power). It would appear that the Lenovo uses "some" power from the USB for internal devices - the built-in webcam being one. Examining the USB ports in Device Manager shows which ports are "used", although I confess the information is not easy to interpret. It looks like this drive needs the full 1 amp (2 x 500mA) from the two ports. On the 3000 N100, using the two ports on the right, nearest the front of the PC, seems do do the trick.
The same applied to my desktop - the two ports I plugged into originally shared a common 500mA supply and that's why the drive didn't work. Again, finding two "independent" ports did the trick.
So it might mean that the Lenovo is a bit marginal in regard to supplying power from the USB ports

USB Drive with FAT32 on Blade 2000 with Solaris 9

I attached a Western Digital USB Drive to the USB-Post of my Sun Blade 2000 running Solaris 9. It is detected immediately:
iostat -En< ... snip SCSI & DVD drives ... >
c3t0d0 Soft Errors: 0 Hard Errors: 0 Transport Errors: 0
Vendor: WDC Product: WD2500JB0104153 Revision: Serial No: Size: 250.06GB <250059350016 bytes>
Media Error: 0 Device Not Ready: 0 No Device: 0 Recoverable: 0
Illegal Request: 0 Predictive Failure Analysis: 0
The drive can be formatted (takes ages) and UFS set up and it runs fine with that. But the goal is to have it running with FAT32 for data exchange with other systems. If it is formated FAT32 with Windows it cannot be mounted using for example
mount -F pcfs dev/dsk/c3t0d0s2 /mnt
mount -F pcfs dev/dsk/c3t0d0s2:1 /mnt
mount -F pcfs dev/dsk/c3t0d0sX:Y /mntetc. with variing numbers for X and Y!
The error message always is equivalent to (I can't recall the exact words): no valid DOS-filesystem found.
Invoking "format" and selecting the disk then asks if the disk should be labeled. If answered with yes all the disk is in one partition. Labelling the disk seems to kill all partitions as reattaching the disk to a Windows computer has the result that the disk has to be initialized and new partitions created. All data is hence lost.
I also tried creating a FAT32 filesystem from Solaris (which would be nice actually, as Windows isn't able to format 250Gig with FAT32 in one chunk) after creating a new partition using:
mkfs -F pcfs dev/dsk/c3t0d0s7Trying to mount this slice then yields:
mount -F pcfs dev/dsk/c3t0d0s7 /mntI/O error
Now I'm out of ideas! Do I have to "activate" FAT32 support specially? It all seemed so easy reading the "Managing USB Devices" in the Solaris 9 Documentation.
Thanks for any help in advance!

Did you try
mount -F pcfs /dev/dsk/c3t0d0s2:c /mnt
What's the contents of the fdisk partition table on Solaris, after you've prepared the USB HDD on windows?
The command "fdisk -W - /dev/dsk/c3t0d0s2" prints the raw fdisk partition infomation.
You can also try to create the pcfs filesystem on Solaris, using something like this:
fdisk /dev/rdsk/c3t0d0s2 (create a 100% FAT32LBA partition, activate it and write back the fdisk label)
mkfs -F pcfs -o fat=32 /dev/rdsk/c3t0d0s2:c

I never got a Mac OS X Lion Recovery USB Drive with my mbp

i was reading online how to make a backup dvd for Lion and it ref that if you bought a new mpb with lion on it it came with a
Mac OS X Lion Recovery USB Drive
i went back and looked in the box ,and nothing
my son just bought a 15 " mbp with moutin lion and there was no usb drive either
how do i get this usb stick
or did apple stop including it
fred

You do not need it It was a buy product for those unable to use the download from the web at a charge of $69
see
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4718

Lock a USB Drive with 10.6.8

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