Re-writing a flash drive.

I know this topic must have come up, but I could not find the exact question or answer I was seeking. I've had this problem since I've had an Apple (one year). It seems that with Windows, I could re-write to a flash drive multiple times, never had to format, etc. With my MacBook Pro, I can delete a file, BUT it does not give me extra space. I know flash drives are cheap now, but ---- isn't there a way to reuse the space??? I've gone into disk-utility and done everything possible to do there, but the available space on the flash remains the same. Thanks.

Flash drives work on Apple computers exactly like they do on Windows computers. You must have a permission or format problem where the computer is not able to delete the files.

Similar Messages

Is writing to flash drive always in "mass USB storage mode"?

I am trying to display JPEGs on my HDTV using a MEDIAGATE M2TV 1080P Media Player. I have written JPEG files to a flash drive and connected the flash drive to the M2TV Player, which doesn't recognize the USB flash drive. The M2TV manual says that only "mass USB storage mode is supported". Are there different modes of storage? What do I get from my mini? Also I assume that my file system is HFS+. Correct? Thanks for any help.
Owen

Mediagate are the people to ask if things aren't working. The questions should be about the partition table (Apple has a couple) of your flash drive (possibly the brand) and the format. (In-camera flash storage has, as you read in the Wikipedia, it's own, unique partition table.) Flash drives probably come from the box with no partition table, but only one partition (volume) formatted in FAT32. This default is rarely changed by people; so that should have worked.
The question is how to transfer your JPEG photos from a Mac hard drive to a flash drive. Only now is it occurring to me that they may just mean their box captures JPEG files and transfers then to your Mac's USB port in USB MSC protocol, not USB PTP.
My ignorance may have confused the issue more. I last studied JPEG when it was released . There was room in the file for EXIF data. However, I doubt they anticipated GPS data and more, which Macs could interpret as metadata (as they do 'keywords'), and require USB PTP protocol to transfer. Well, this is wrong.
I borrowed a JPEG photo with a huge EXIF file, containing GPS data, and changed the suffix to .TXT, opened it in TextEdit, saved it, and dragged this non-photo file (using, presumably, USB MSC protocol) to a flash drive formatted HFS. I then changed the suffix to .JPG and opened it with the Finder. Its size hadn't changed, and its EXIF data hadn't changed. So, PTP is a mystery to me: I don't know what advantages it offers, though I choose it on cameras. Perhaps Mediagate can explain it, since it's the preferred protocol for transferring photos.
If you really need to copy a photo to a flash drive in USB MSC protocol, you can always change the suffix to .TXT and back. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable can help. (I'm unfamiliar with your device.)
Best of luck.
Bruce

How can I serialize writing of files to a flash drive.

I received a photo viewer for xmas. I want to write a bunch of photos to a flash drive to playback on the photo viewer. I would like the photos to playback in the order written. I thought I could control this by the order of the files written (the file names are also ordered e.g., photo 1, photo 2,...) but that does not seem to work - instead the playback order is scrambled. My theory on what is happening is the flash drive is buffering the incoming files and so they get written in a funny order (of course, my theory could be incorrect). If I write them 1 at a time, all is well; but if I write 10 files, they get scrambled.
I could do them 1 at a time but that will be tedious (and I have different groups of photos to record but only one flash drive). Is there some easy way that I can force serialization of the flash drive writing, other than doing it manually (e.g., write/readback, then write the next/readback and so on).

I had my original question a little wrong and in retrospect should have put it under iPhoto.
But I did find the solution to my problem and thought I'd pass it along.
If one has a iPhoto album that one wishes to put out to a flash drive in the same order as the arrangement in the album. One selects the photos; clicks File, then Export. Then in the popup, select Sequential with a prefix of Photo (or some such). Then click export; select the flash drive and click ok.
This results in the photos being written to the flash drive in the same order as the arrangement in the album. And for my situation, the photos play back in the desired order on the photo viewer.

Can I install Windows ON a flash drive or on flash memory?

All over the internet I see questions from people wanting to install Windows from a USB flash drive with varying results, but my question is different. I want to install Windows ON removable flash memory. I would like to purchase a MacBook Air, but would like to also continue making use of Boot Camp without taking up too much of my limited hard drive space. I've found fast 3.0 USB sticks and flash cards that would be nice, but can they be treated as a partition in order to install and run Windows?

Ignoring the fact that Windows doesn't really support booting from removable media (you might be able to force it if you are willing to build a custom installer), I can think of another reason you wouldn'r want to consider this. Windows is notorious for heavy usage of the swap file, and I believe I recall reading one report where someone had managed to install Windows to a flash drive, and within 30-60 minutes, the OS had written to the swap file so much that the flash memory was beginning to fail. Remember that each time you write to flash memory, it cases a small amount of damage to the memory, and after a significant number of writed, it will fail. Regretfully, the Woindows swap file will cause this threshhold to be reached very quickly, and then you start getting write errors...

Flash drive only "pretends" to eject - help!

I am trying to transfer data from a Power Mac G5 running OS 10.3.9 to a 4 GB USB flash drive. After finishing the copying procedures, I attempt to eject the drive by dragging it to the trash bin, clicking the eject button within a finder window, or using the "eject" option from a pull-down menu, etc. The drive icon disappears from my desktop, but somehow it has not "finished" ejecting, for when I pull out the drive, I get the error message about not having ejected properly. I've tried this multiple times, even waiting for several hours for the ejection process to "finish," and each time have ended up with at least 1/2 my files on the flash drive being corrupted and useless.
I have a large amount of data to transfer, since I'm trying to get it transferred from an old work/school computer to a personal computer at my new workplace. Thus, for efficiency's sake I cannot spend days/weeks transferring these data in smaller bits and it's not worth trying to go through the hundreds of different files to check each and every one to see if it's been corrupted!
Any suggestions? Thank you!!

Thanks for your help so far, BDAqua, Squirrel2 and Japamac.
The only Mac I'm working with is actually this one here at school - the other computers at home and my new workplace are PCs running Windows XP and 7, so I guess reformatting the flash drive in HFS+ is out. The ultimate place I'd like to get the data stored is an external hard drive, but it of course has an NTFS filesystem, which a Mac can't write to... and the work-around I found (NTFS-3G for Mac OS X plus MacFuse) only works with 10.4 and up.
When copying using the flash drive, I've always been connecting it to the direct ports on the towers (whether the G5 or my PC)
We can't upgrade the OS due to software incompatibility/price issues, so I'm kind of stuck with it - argh! To add to that, I'm wary of running troubleshooting or drive maintenance on the G5 right now since it contains data and programs belonging to a number of other people, and it's not feasible just now to run the risk of letting it go out of commission, even for a day (it's thesis-writing season!). That said, I'd be willing to bet a good bit of money that the G5's hard drive is not in "good health," so I'm just going to try burning my data to a DVD so I can be done with this machine once and for all! I've had some issues in the past with writing DVDs on this G5, but it appears to be my last chance unless I'm willing to wait a while.
A friend of mine suggested using Dropbox, which I was very gleeful about until finding out that Dropbox only works on 10.4 and up, as well!
Anyway, thanks again for all of your help and suggestions!

Updated to latest operating system on MacBook Pro and now won't let me drag files onto a flash drive.

Updated to latest operating system OS X Mavericks on MacBook Pro and now won't let me drag files onto a flash drive.

The Flash Disk must be NTSF formatted. Writing to NTFS requires 3rd party drivers (Tuxera, Paragon). Reading from NTFS however does not require these. So install NTFS drivers, or format the drive in FAT32 from Disk Utility.
Hope this helps :-)

Ext4 flash drive partition permission problem (Solved)

I want to have a linux partition on flash drive which I can insert on any linux system and have it automounted and to have read and write permission so as to copy and transfer files. I tried ext4 partition but it is not allowing me write after automounting (I need to open thunar with sudo for writing). I do not want to use fat32 format. I tried searching for this in wiki/forums/web but mostly it is suggested to mount it manually for proper permissions. Is it possible to have the partition automounted with read/write permission for the default user? Can ext2/ext3 provide this facility? Thanks for your help.
Last edited by rnarch (2012-08-12 12:59:10)

well, the chown command makes it (presumably) your user as the owner, and then possibly the "user" group as the group owner. the chmod command then sets the permissions to 777 which is the same as setting it to ugo+rwx (user,group, and other add read, write and execute). So it should give correct permissions for access by anyone (hence other is given read write and execute permissions).
For access via same user, it is not the name, but rather the user id that is key. Same goes for group. For instance, on my machine, I previously dual booted with OSX, so in order to give mysefl access to my OSX partition without issue, I issued myself an UID of 501, which is where OSX starts issuing UID's. Whereas typically linux starts at 1000. But I can give mysefl any username I want as long as my uid matches.
Make sense?

Is my flash drive safe?

I have a flash drive that is not supposed to allow password protection or encryption. Somehow I did not know that. When I set up the drive, I right clicked on it and Mavericks allowed me to encrypt it with a password. When I insert the drive into the USB on my iMac, it always asks for my password. I talked with the manufacturer of the flash drive who was baffled how Mavericks overrode its software to allow for the use of a password. I'm baffled myself. Does anyone know how this might have happened? Is this flash drive really safe?
I plugged the drive in to a Windows computer just to see what would happen, and it did not recognize the drive at all. Is this because it was formatted for an Apple computer?
Should I erase this drive and move on to a safe one, or should it be all right?

There isn't a storage device in the world that can prevent a user from password protecting the data on it. In your case, you used FileVault, but you could also use various apps to password protect a compressed archive, such as a .zip file that requires a password to open it after being created.
I talked with the manufacturer of the flash drive who was baffled how Mavericks overrode its software to allow for the use of a password.
Whatever software they included with the drive was wiped out as soon as you reformatted it for use with a Mac. Not sure why that would confuse them. There would be nothing to stop a Windows users who didn't reformat the drive to encrypt the data fully, or selectively either. Sounds like the manufacturer doesn't understand the basics or writing data to a drive, as hard as that would seem to believe.
As Barney said, Windows didn't recognize the drive because it's now formatted as Mac OS Extended, which Windows cannot read without installing third party software.
There's nothing wrong with the drive the way you have it. There's no need to erase it.
Don't be overly concerned about the BBC article notcloudy was referring to. It takes deep knowledge of, and the ability to write data to the embedded EEPROM of the flash drive to do what he noted. It can't happen by simply plugging it into a computer.

Tiger "quits" when eject ext flash drive???? Addressless addressbook

Folks:
Issues continue to crop up with Tiger, unlike those seen in Panther. A week back was finishing up working on a document which I saved to ext flash drive--closed the writing app, moved doc into flash drive, then ejected Flash drive by control/click and then maybe closed another app or turned off airport wireless &&& then got black window saying "You need to restart your computer." Then after restarted got an error window that said something like -- "You had to re-start your computer because OSX quit in the middle of what you were doing." OHHHH, the computer crashed!!!!??? I have ejected the Flash drive many times without this problem. Console crashreporter log showed single line entry for the time period that it happened--Thu Jun 21 17:41:44 2007 crashdump[94]: crashdump invoked as panicdump.
Is this what 4.10 is supposed to fix???
2). Needed my Addressbook to get email address of friend--opened the "ALL" part and there was only 15 or so addresses instead of what should have been 147 or so. Went to one of the smaller groups folders and all of the addresses were there??? How can there be more addresses in sub-category folder than in the total "All" folder?? Flipped back to the "All" folder after that just seconds later and lo and behold--all addresses were there??? This actually never went on with Panther frankly were stuff disappeared and the reappears seconds later--Is this an example of the SMART folder??? Will 4.10 fix this issue??
eep

Folks:
Looking for some thoughts or ideas on why the entire system would "quit"--perhaps due to ejecting a flash drive? That seems more serious than an addressless addressbook, although when needing an address, one might hope to find it in Addressbook, right? In Panther applications would "quit" just because it felt like it--but not the whole system. Is this "normal" now, routine?
eep
iBook G4, 14, 933 MHz, Mac OS X (10.4.9) iMac G4, 15, 800MHz, (10.1.5)

Flash drive problem

Ok so the other day, I put my flash drive in and do what I need to do. I go to eject it and it won't eject. I tried doing it in finder and on the desktop, neither way worked. I had to be somewhere so I just took it out without ejecting. So then a few days later I notice that finder still says my flash drive is there, naturally when I clicked it said no content. The icon isn't on the desktop though. I just reinserted my flash drive and it still shows up in finder, but still says no content, but it didn't pop up on my desktop.
I was also having problems with it recognizing my ipod. One last thing, I tried to click "about this mac" to figure out my right version of OS X, but nothing would come up. I got it December 2006 though. Any suggestions would be helpful.

Hi memanzo
When a USB memory drive won't eject, it's normally because the computer is still writing information to it. All write requests to the device are queued up and they carry on in the background while you're getting on with something else. This is because the devices are quite slow compared to the hard disc. Once all queued up writes have finished, you can eject the device.
If you do pull out a device without properly ejecting it then the remaining queued up writes can't happen and the device may be corrupted. I recommend you use Utilities/Disk Utility to test its file system integrity before trying to store any more information on it. If it is corrupted then use the same utility to reformat it.
Bob

Im trying to bring a movie from imovie to a pc using a flash drive, but the movie file (.mov) will not play on a pc

Im trying to bring a movie from imovie to a pc using a flash drive, but the movie file (.mov) will not play on a pc. help!

I would like to offer you some additional hair, but I've pulled mine out as well. I have created a slideshow of my daughter's new house (a very nice place indeed) as a house-warming gift, took all the pix myself with a throw-away camera made into CD's, imported all of the photos, cropped and enhanced with Iaza online free photo editor, re-saved the new ones to a folder, imported the selected ones into iPhoto, had the best thematic photo printed in 8x10 format, bought the black DVD's, made the MPEG-4 movie as well as the suggested exportable to iPhone, created a folder with the slides, crafted a nice playlist in iTunes, merged it all in iPhoto, but cannot successfuly export it into iDVD. The technical documentation and writing for some of this stuff is sloppy and sometimes unintelligible. The instructional videos are incomplete. The One-on-One fellow was most helpful the other day and said Apple doesn't really have or support an functional DVD creation tool and suggested I choose one or another "app" at the "app store", but the reviews for the two major ones are shallow in depth and I haven't yet sprunf for the $20-$40 download so I can re-experience the difficult learning curve. The Macintoshs I once used were incredibly intuitive; the iMac requires some study. The slideshow I have is imperfect becauae it keeps reverting to custom slide-specific choices I have decided (several times) that I do not want, but it keeps slipping back into "Ken Burns" mode and some of the photos don't work in that mode because of their format. But I will settle for less-than-perfect if I can figure out the best way to export the MPEG-4 I have created into a Maxell DVD-R some time before my daughter's toddlers aged 4 and 2 get into kindergarten.

Flash drive with ipad mini

Is there a way to use a flash drive with an ipad mini. I'm planning on buying my son and daughter each an Ipad mini this Xmas.The school uses Flash Drives. Is there some sort of adapter, maybe after market, that they can do there classwork on to turn in projects??
Thanks,
Chris

chrisfromchapin wrote:
Thanks Guys, Any ideas about a tablet that would work the best, Kindle, Nook???
Neither for school work, IMHO. Get them laptops instead. They will be much better off writing papers and doing serious study work (assuming their school actually makes them work these days). Yeah, they cost more, but kids are expensive.... just like wives!

Unacceptable performance with USB3 flash drive on USB2 interface

Just purchased a 64G USB3 flash drive to be used with my old nc8230 with XP Pro. The notebook's USB2 interface works perfectly with all types of USB2 devices. However, writing and reading data on the USB 3 thumb drive is extremely slow. Loading it with 42GB of data (10000 files) took me 5.5 hours!!! Tests showed, that when reading or writing a file I see an initial delay of about 2 minutes until the transfer of data starts and seems to work perfectly.
I just updated the USB driver to the latest version available - no improvement.
Needless to say that the problem does not show up on other PCs - showing that the thumb drive is OK.
Handling the above mentioned 42GB data on my external 2.5" drive via the same USB port works perfectly as well (no delays).
Any idea? Thanks

Please cancel this question.
In case someone were interested here some more details:
In the meantime I made more tests and found out that the problem is caused by the new USB3 thumb drive and not the notebook. The initial good results on other PCs were caused by the point that I did not fully understand how to reproduce the failure. After this is now clear (primarily high latency times especially when generating directory entries but also when reading the directory structure), the problem showed up equally on another notebook with XP and a desktop with Win7.
I'm now trying to get a replacement.
Thanks, Dieter

Satellite M40-237: CD Boot not working + is USB flash drive boot possible

*Model: Satellite M40-237 (PSM40E)*
I decided to reinstall windows, my hard drive is currently formatted. So as usual, boot from Windows CD is needed to start instalation but it simply won't boot. I never had problems like this, boot always worked. It is like there is no bootable CD in the drive (but it is bootable and it is working on another PC).
- i have the latest BIOS
- BIOS detects optical drive and everything is ok, HDD is primary ODD is secondary
- i tried selecting boot priority with F12 and/or setting it from BIOS, but it won't work either way
What could be the problem here? Drive not working properly (i hope it is that and not something worse)? I had some problems with the drive i before (writing...), but it reads CD/DVD's normally and like i said boot was working fine before. I cleaned the lens a little, disconected it and put it back. Is there anything more i can do ?
I am trying to find someone who has the drive that fits so i can try with that one, but who knows when will that be.
Now, here is the second question i have related to this. Because my laptop is practically useless currently (i can't install anything), is it possible to boot from:
a) external USB optical drive
b) USB flash drive
Bios on this laptop has no USB boot option, it has HDD / CD / FDD / network. But I've red somewhere that FDD = USB if legacy emulation is enabled.
If that is correct i should just plug the USB drive and select FDD as boot option ? If i can't find USB optical drive, i was thinking of making USB bootable flash disk and copying windows xp installation on it. So once it boots into DOS i just start setup from the stick.
tnx

First of all I have to say that the booting from USB flash memory (USB stick) is not possible and you shouldnt waste the time trying this.
Regarding your CD/DVD drive booting issue
Well, its really strange it sounds a little bit like a kind of master/slave/c-sel settings issue. But usually you should get a IDE (#0 or #1) error if one of the devices (HDD or ODD) would be not recognized ?:|
The whole story sounds mysteriously
Maybe there is a firmware issue
Several months ago a friend of mine was not able to boot from the CD.
He entered the BIOS and set the BIOS back to the default settings.
This helped
This is a suggestion but I really dont know if it helps.

USB flash drive defined as boot device but not visible by the boot driver.

I have installed Mountain Lion (10.8.2) over Lion a few days ago. In the follow-up operations, I tried to create a USB flash drive recovery device, using methods widely advertised over the web. I first tried this with an 8 GB "Kingston DT 101 G2" device. The creation of the device either manually through the use of the Disk Utility or using a small utility called Lion DiskMaker 2.0.2 worked OK.
However, after setting the resulting device as the boot device through "System Preference", it never booted on it, but instead on the normal system disk. Conversely, when booting with the option key depressed, I could only see as option the normal system disk or its recovery partition, but never the USB flash drive, although it was present.
After numerous tests, through the so-called "trial and error" method, I eventually found out that I obtained perfectly bootable USB devices with either a generic device seen as "USB 2 USB Flash Drive" by the disk utility, or with a "Kingston Data Traveler G3" USB flash drive (both being 8 GB devices).
Now, I can understand that, for whatever reason, some USB devices, although formatted as boot devices, will not be seen by the boot driver. But, in such a case, it is a serious issue that "System Preference" accepts to set them as boot devices. I would suggest that "System Preference" tests whether the boot driver is able to see them and, if not, issues an error message instead of accepting them as boot device.
I also have an unrelated side question: when restoring a disk through the Disk Utility, is the resulting new volume defragmented and compacted by the process or not?

I can only tell you that some USB flash drives don't work as expected on Macs, and I don't believe it is specifically related to the product since they often work for others. I have five flash drives from a particular manufacturer that when plugged into one of my computers are not recognized, yet they are on all my other computers. I have six or seven older ones from the same manufacturer, same model, that work fine on all my computers. I have two Kingston Travelers that would not work as a bootable device on any of my computers. Many other users here have had issues with San Disk flash drives.
I don't know if this helps any, but at least you can know that you aren't alone.
One thing I can suggest is when you prepare a new flash drive that you go through this process:
1. Open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder.
2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
3. Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from the drop down menu to one. Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID then click on the OK button. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Partition button and wait until the process has completed.
4. Select the volume you just created (this is the sub-entry under the drive entry) from the left side list. Click on the Erase tab in the DU main window.
5. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Security button, check the button for Zero Data and click on OK to return to the Erase window.
6. Click on the Erase button. The format process can take up to several hours depending upon the drive size.
This may fix boot problems with new flash drives because they are often prepared by the manufacturer with NTFS. To fully clear the drive you must both partition and format the device. Writing zeros has in some cases helped make a drive bootable when at first it was not.

Re-writing a flash drive.

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