USB Flash Drive Powered but Not Mounting

I have two USB flash drives that refuse to mount on my 13" MacBook Pro running 10.6.7.
The flash drive powers on, and blinks a bit.
The drive shows up in Disk Utility but the volumes are listed generically (like disk1s2) rather than having their proper volume name.
Clicking the mount button with a colume selected appears ineffective.
Trying to eject the drive results in:
The disk “Kingston DataTraveler 200 Media” could not be unmounted.
Ideas
Pulling the drive out without ejecting crashes Disk Utility. The Disk Utility Log doesn't say anything helpful.
I have two drives I've tried, opne the Kingston above which has two HFS+J volumes and another one formatted FAT32. Both drives work great on a different MacBook. I don't have other drives on hand to test at the moment.
I have MacFUSE and NTFS-3G and Parallels 6, installed, I haven't tried disabling them yet. Anyone else experiencing similar issues? Figured it out yet? Ideas?

Just so you don't think you're alone, I've been having the same problem, but with firewire devices. I'm searching around to see if there's a solution. I re-ran the 10.4.3 combo updater and it seemed to "fix" things for a while, but now the problem is back. I was in the middle of a copy from a FW CD-drive and it just disconnected. Then the iMac disconnected a hard drive attached to the other FW port. So it's happening on both ports, even when the computer is actively engaged in something.
I'm going to run the updater again. Then I might try downgrading to 10.4.2.

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Firewire Drive Recognized, but not Mounting

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Also, the iMac can successfully work in Target Disk mode on another computer, but so far won't recognize an external hard drive (WD 2TB) or MacBook in Target Disk mode. Also, I only have a Firewire 400 cable to use, and the computer recognized and mounts the drive using USB 2.0.
Any suggestions? I've already tried resetting the SMC and PRAM... Not sure what I'm up against now...
Thank you!
-Kevin Cramblet

You saying the external drive works with USB and doesn't with FW and you only have a FW400 cable? I assume your mac uses FW800. FW800 requires a 9-pin connector. FW400 a 6-pin. Cables and adapters exist to go from 9-pin to 6-pin. But I don't think plugging a 6-pin FW400 cable into 9-pin FW800 socket will work. That's probably your problem.
Monoprice.com firewire cables.

Portable hard drive powering, but not showing up in Disk Utility

I just purchased an ADATA portable hard drive and my MacBook Pro powers it but does not recognize it. It is brand new and has not been used on any other machine. Any ideas?
Thanks in advance,
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Some portable drives draw too much power, the Mac might have cut it off or it doesn't have enough power for it.
It might be defective, take it back and buy a quality Hitachi external drive, Western Digital next in quality, preferablly self powered and not a eco-type drive.

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I have a strange problem with a USB flash drive which refuses to mount on the desktop of my MDD FW800. It registers in System Profiler but not in Disk Utility. I can't get it to mount using Terminal either. The Terminal screen says it has mounted but it doesn't appear on the desktop and I can't access it. However, if I do a restart with the the drive plugged in, it does mount. If I eject it and then try to plug it in again, it won't mount! Very frustrating.
It works fine on my Powerbook and my Digital Audio so it can't be the drive itself that's the problem. Not quite sure when this started but it may have been after I installed a PCI USB2.0 card (a Ratoc Rex-PCIU3). The card itself works fine with other USB products and I don't have any deep sleep problems with it either. I'm stumped.
Any suggestions anyone?
Alex
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Hello rickame
Click on the desktop then go up to the menu bar and select Finder / Finder Preferences / General and make sure the box's are checked for Hard disk, External disks, etc.. then reconnect the drive. If you still don't see it on the desktop it may have been improperly disconnected from the iMac while mounted, look to see if it show's up in Disk Utilities and the System Profiler on the USB bus. If you are plugging it into the keyboard, try one of the USB ports on the back of the iMac or a powered hub. There also could be a conflict with other USB devices, try ejecting and disconnect things like an iPod, a printer/scanner or camera, then restarting the iMac and connect only the Flash drive.
Dennis

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as a new MacBook user, when inserting my USB Flash Drive, I do not know how to access its contents. Please help. Thanks.

Open a new Finder window, Finder > File > New Finder Window, and it should appear on the left under Devices.
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I want to make my USB flash drive unreadable, but I don't know how to do it. I can only find threads about problems with unreadable drives, but I don't have a problem, I want to make it unreadable. Is there a way to do it (like OS X can't read NTFS, but I want that with HFS+ for a specific flash drive too).

Actually, Mac OS X can read NTFS. So I'm not at all sure what you're trying to do. Are you trying to encrypt a drive, or destroy the data on a drive, or make it so that Windows users can't read it, or make it so that Mac users can't read it, or make it read-only (like NTFS on a Mac)? Or something else entirely?

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Yes, you want to create a captive runtime, it is the AIR app packaged with the runtime for your platform of choice.
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/air/build/WSfffb011ac560372f709e16db131e43659b9-8000.html

Can't boot from a USB flash drive

I believe this ability was lost after updating to BIOS 80.52 following HP's "strong recommendation".No warning was given that this update would remove this ability and see that "Due to security changes, after this BIOS update is installed, previous versions cannot be reinstalled."
I have tried disabling Secure Boot and enabling Legacy Boot, and tried re-applying BIOS defaults.
Is there a particular combination of BIOS settings that I haven't been able to find?As the warranty on my computer expired in July 2014, the HP Customer Support Contact page won't even accept my request for assistance - despite the "strongly recommended" BIOS update being made available *after* this date. I require the ability to boot from USB flash drives ... how can this now be achieved?
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Boot a BIOS flashing program from CD or DVD and somehow bypass the HP BIOS's block on updates? Thanks in advance for any advice

Hi, thanks for the quick reply. I don't have another PC handy but will try to find one. The USB flash drive definitely does NOT appear in the boot menu - even as an HDD or CD/DVD as I have seen mentioned elsewhere as a possibility - and all USB devices are enabled in the BIOS settings and USB HDD and USB Floppy/CD are above rEFInd and all other entries in the boot order. I should also have mentioned that I've tried a (Lexar) USB flash drive prepared approximately a year ago with GParted Live which *has* previously booted the machine, and also different models of flash drives (Toshiba, Transcend) and different methods of preparing them such as burning bootable ISO images with Win32DiskImager, Universal USB Installer and Rufus, and manually creating and formatting a bootable FAT32 partition with diskpart (as per https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj200124.aspx) and copying in System Rescue CD/GParted/Clonezilla files, ensuring there is an /EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.efi file. In diskpart, the "attributes disk" command shows that the USB drives are not marked as bootable and "help attributes disk" says READONLY is currently the only disk flag that may be changed. (Don't know if this means anything as the GParted disk isn't "bootable" but did boot) Did the BIOS update disable enumerating USB devices until later in the Windows 8.1 boot process?

USB Flash Drive is seen by Mac but will not mount

I use an HP 32GB flash drive, formatted exFAT, to transfer files. My Windows PC and other MacBooks in my house running older Mac OS X versions read this flash drive just fine. This flash drive used to show up on the desktop of my newest MacBook Pro 15 (late 2011) too.
However, after upgrading to 10.7.5 I experienced numerous problems (Time Machine, etc.) and the USB Drive fails to mount onto the desktop or be recognized by any application. I cannot get Apple's Disk Utility to recognize the flash drive either.
Interestingly enough
1. The System Information window of my MacBook Pro shows the USB drive when it is attached. The Mac even knows it is an HP 32GB drive. But Disk Tools does not see it, I cannot format or read it in any other way on this Mac.
2. when I launch Windows 7 OS through Parallels, then install the USB drive, these applications too fail to recognize the flash drive. But if I pull out the USB flash drive then a screen appears for a split-second, as though somehow the MacBook Pro knew the drive had been pulled.
Moments ago I downloaded the OS X 10.7.5 supplment "Software Mac OS X Lion 10.7.5 (11G63)", but while that may have fixed Time Machine, I see no changes to the USB drive recognition.
Any ideas?
MacBook Pro (15-inch Late 2011), Mac OS X (10.7.5)

iDVD '11 works on Mountain Lion. You just need to get an old iLife '11 DVD.

USB Flash Drive not mounting

I recently bought an 8GB USB flash drive, which came formatted FAT-32. The drive was put into a friend's Windoze laptop and had a couple GBs of jpeg and avi files transferred to it. I took the drive home and put it in my white MacBook (4GB RAM, Leopard 10.5.8) and it would not mount. I put it in my G4 MacMini; likewise, it wouldn't mount. I am assuming it also won't mount in all my older Macs with USB, either. I returned it to the Windoze laptop, and it ALSO wouldn't mount this time, except as one pulled the flash drive from the Windoze laptop, for a second a window with the flash drive's contents would flash on the desktop of the laptop. Originally, the flash drive was "properly" ejected from the Windoze laptop.
On the MacBook, both Disk Utility and DiskWarrior do not see the flash drive when it is in the USB port (either port). However, Apple System Profiler does recognize when it is plugged into the port. ASP returns the following information when the flash drive is in the high speed USB port:
"Flash Disk:
Product ID: 0x3234
Vendor ID: 0x1221
Version: 0.00
Serial Number: 10000000000003CF
Speed: Up to 480 Mb/sec
Manufacturer: USB2.0
Location ID: 0x24100000
Current Available (mA): 500
Current Required (mA): 100"
Anybody have any idea what is the cause of my problems with the flash Drive and how I can get the drive to mount? I don't think the problem is a function of my Apple hardware, as my USB ports on all my machines function with everything else USB which I have without problems. Thanks.

I know that, but I have USB in my older Macs, too, and besides, some of the most knowledgeable people are in these older forums!!
I've come to the conclusion that the drive may be defective, too, but I was just looking for some possible angle which I'd not already considered. I tried reformatting, but without the drive even being recognized, it isn't even possible to reformat. I can only get ASP to indicate that it is attached.
Thanks for your try!

Photoshop Elements 12 will not let me save files edited on a usb flash drive, but will photos on the hard drive all other apts will on the flash drive

Photoshop Elements 12 will not let me save files edited on a usb flash drive, but will photos on the hard drive all other apts will on the flash drive

Thanks for the information and your help. I have never bothered before changing the format. Next time I will.
I copied the library to the external drive and then it went and said they were referenced files but I was okay about that. Now it cannot see them and will not do anything with them. I think I will buy another external drive and start again by importing all of my files again. I guess 55K will keep the mac busy this week.

Usb flash drive not mounting when inserted (SOLVED)

Hi,
I am (now) using fvwm-crystal with rox as my file manager and when i insert a usb flash drive in to a usb port nothing happens. I check /media and nothing is there. Yes i do have hal started at boot.
I reinstalled arch with xfce4.
Last edited by theringmaster (2007-10-09 20:28:42)

Well, there are the on-line manual pages:
man ivman
man IvmConfigActions.xml
man IvmConfigBase.xml
man IvmConfigConditions.xml
man IvmConfigProperties.xml
And there are examples in the default files (/etc/ivman/) provided with Ivman.
But that you probably already know. I'm not familiar with any other docs, except maybe tutorials on the net if you count them as docs

USB Flash Drive not readable using 10.4.6 but is with 10.3.9

I noticed that a 32MB USB Flash Drive that used to work on my Powerbook when it was running 10.3.9 became unreadable when I upgraded to 10.4.6. This flash drive still works on my Dell WinXP system and I just tried booting the powerbook off a clone of my 10.3.9 setup (on an external firewire drive) and my flash drive works on that. So it appears to me that 10.4 has introduced a software bug that has disabled support for some flash drives. I will note that I also use a USB compact flash reader for transfering digital pictures and that does work under 10.4.6 so the problem does not affect all USB flash devices.
Is Apple aware of this? Are they working on it?
PB 1.5 GHz G4 15 Mac OS X (10.4.5)

Have you tried to open it in disk utility? Probably won't, but worth a shot. If not and you don't know who made it, then I'd say your out of luck. Probably time for a new Flash drive.
A 32meg Flash Drive today is very cheap if you can find one. You can get a 250 meg Flash drive for $20-$30. That's 8 times the storage you have now.

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.

USB FLASH DRIVE WORKS ON MAC BUT NOT ON WINDOWS... CAUSE I ERASED IT IN MAC

I decided to take my work flash drive home to work on a file. At home I saw that some weird files were on the flash drive and wouldn't delete, so I decided to save my files on my Mac and erase the USB flash drive. I selected the flash drive (by the way it's a 2 GB flashdrive) and I used the SECURITY OPTION 35 PASS ERRASE. Format: MS-DOS (FAT).
Everything was fine until I took my flash drive to work and plugged it on a Windows XP Computer and it appeared as Drive E I think and when I tried to open it it asked me to format it. I risked it and clicked OK and it said that I didn't have sufficient rights or something.
SUMMERY:
2 GB USB ERASED USING MAC DISSK UTILITY
EVERYTHING FINE UNTIL I PLUG IN THE FLASH DRIVE IN A WINDOWS
WINDOWS ASKS ME TO REFORMAT FILE
I PLUG IT INTO A MAC COMPUTER AT WORK AND IT DOES WORK
IF ANYBODY KNOWS HOW DO I FIX THIS THANKS?

The drive is probably now formatted for a Mac only file system. To format for a PC:
Insert the drive in the Mac and start Disk Utility (Utilities folder).
Select the drive in the left column. Be sure to select the drive (all the way to the left) not a volume (indented below the drive name).
Select the "Partition" tab.
Set "Volume Scheme" to "1 Partition" (not "Current" even if it's already one partition).
Click the "Options" button".
Select "Master Boot Record".
Click the "OK" button.
Enter a volume name (all uppercase).
Set "Format" to "MS-DOS (FAT)".
Click the "Apply" button.

USB Flash Drive Powered but Not Mounting

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