Problem mounting USB flash drives...

[ntj]

Hi,

I have a Sony Microvault usb flash drive, which until yesterday was working fine. However, it has suddenly stopped mounting on my machine. Similarly, my digital cam usb flash card has stopped mounting as well.

Here's the particulars:

I'm running a g5 in OSX 10.4.5. I've tried the flash drives in every port on my machine, none of which allow it too mount. The flash drives are recognized both in Disk Utility and in System Profiler. I've attempted to mount it manually in disk utility, however it gives me an error that states I should try Repair Disk and then try mounting again. Verify Disk and Repair Disk both say the drive is working fine. In fact, the drive works perfectly fine on my other machines, both Mac and PC.

All of this leads me to believe that it is not an issue with the flash drive, nor is it an issue with the actual usb ports... I'm assuming this is a software issue in OSX. Maybe a permissions problem or something?

Anyone have any suggestions?

[Frida]

Have you repaired the permissions and the disk? See the second post in this thread –> http://www.macosx.com/forums/showthr...28#post1292428

[ntj]

Frida,

Thanks for the reply, I've repaired the permissions and the disk, but it didn't solve my problem.

Such a weird problem.... My ipod photo will mount fine through the usb, but for some reason anything based on compactflash (microvault, digital camera, ipod shuffle) just won't mount.

Nathan

[Frida]

Have you tried re-formatting the flash drive with DiskUtility?

[ntj]

Yeah, I've re-formatted the flash drive, but that didnt solve the problem.

And since *none* of my flash based drives work on my machine, yet they *all* work on other machines, I've come to the conclusion that it is not the flash drives thats causing this.

It appears to me as if something in my OSX install has been corrupted/turned off/otherwise gone missing and this is causing my machine to not recognize compactflash.

Is there something in OSX that controls how compactflash is read? Is there a chunk of linux coding that would control my machines ability to read compactflash, and if so, could this be corrupted?

I'm no techie (unfortunately), so I'm merely taking stabs in the dark of what might be causing this.

[ntj]

bump!

[Frida]

Weird. The only other thing I can think of is to go to Finder–>Preferences–>General and making sure that all three checkboxes are ticked (show hard drives, iPods, etc). Oh, and do you by any chance have Norton Antivirus running? In that case turn AutoProtect off. Norton for Mac has been discontinued and had a whole bunch of issues. It stuffed my G4 up in many ways. I trashed it and it's been working fine since.

[ntj]

unfortunately neither of those suggestions are the problem either....

i really appreciate the help Frida.... i was hoping that someone would eventually stumble upon my post and have an answer... but it seems like everyone is as confused by this as i am. (im fearing a clean install of os X is my only option at this point..... is there anyway to install an older version of os X without wiping out my program installs?)

thanks for trying to help me out though, i appreciate the time and effort