"you have inserted a disk containing no volumes that Mac OS X can read."

B

Bartendress

Registered
Hi,

I recently got back from a trip where I was working on a friend's PC and saving my work to my USB flash drive. Files include photos and graphics. Now when I insert my USB into my Mac, I get the following message:

"you have inserted a disk containing no volumes that Mac OS X can read." Then I have the option to initialize, ignore or eject. Ignoring does nothing, and I initialized which took me to Disk Utility where I first verified the disk and then repaired the disk. Neither fixed the problem. I still continue to get that message when I insert my USB flash drive. Help! I cannot access any of my files on it. What to do?

I'm on a PowerPC G4, Mac OS X 10.3.9

Thanks.
 
1 of 2 things could be happening:

Either the Drive is formatted such that it's unreadable on a mac (there aren't many, by the way)

Most likely, unfortunately, is that your USB Drive has gone bad. Flash drives are notorious for this, and we all tend to learn this the hard way. You can try plugging it into the PC you last used it on, or any Windows box, and that MIGHT help you out there. But most likely, you're out of luck.

Tips for the future: Never let the only copy of a file live on a USB drive. Always save somewhere else, like burned to a CD for example. And never work on files directly on a USB drive. They should only be used to copy files TO or FROM, thats all. The memory in these things is cheap, and each bit has a finite amount of times it can be written to. If one bit fails, it can ruin the whole drive.

Sorry to be a downer. Good luck.
 
It is not at all clear that you ever really saved anything to your flash drive. The first thing that you need to do is to take your flash drive back in the PC to see if that computer sees it. If it can, then I would copy my files to a new drive.

Here is the thing: Most USB flash drives are formatted FAT16 or FAT32 out of blister pack. Your Mac should read these without issue. Many newer ones have that god-awful U3 partition. Your Mac cannot read the U3 partition, but it can read the rest of the drive. Even if your drive is formatted NTFS, your Mac can read it. It just can't write to it without additional software.

Long story short--there is no good reason for your Mac not to read your USB flash drive. That leaves only bad reasons. It appears as though your drive has gone bad.
 
Thanks for the replies. I inserted the USB drive back into a PC and it worked fine. All my files are there just as I'd saved them. Is there any instance where once you use a PC program on an image it makes it incompatible with Mac and therefore Mac won't read it on the drive?

I tried taking some of the new files off my USB drive and re-inserting it into the Mac, but no go. If I transfer all the files to the PC, is there a special way to wipe the USB drive clean and start fresh, or do you just delete all the files and hope for the best?
 
Bartendress said:
... If I transfer all the files to the PC, is there a special way to wipe the USB drive clean and start fresh, or do you just delete all the files and hope for the best?
Click to expand...
As r3ndy told you, USB flash drives go bad. A reformatted bad flash drive is a still a bad flash drive. r3ndy mentioned the possibility that your drive may be formatted with a file system that you Mac can't read. Well, the only format that the Mac can't read would be the encrypted partition on many new drives. However, the drive is not completely encrypted unless you encrypted it.

I've seen students get terribly confused when trying to deal with data that they had stored on encrypted partitions. However, I have never seen such a drive be completely unreadable by a Mac. My earlier recommendation to you was to copy your data from the USB flash drive that is giving you trouble to a different USB drive. Do not use the U3 partition!
 
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