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Thumb Drive Weirdness
#19459 12/03/11 07:38 AM
Joined: Aug 2009
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Joined: Aug 2009
I inserted a 2 GB off-brand cheapo thumb drive in my 18 month old iMac. But the device would not appear on the desktop. Disk Utilities and DiskWarrior were unable to see the device. No alerts, no dialogue, no nada!

So I then tried it on my wife’s 4 year old iMac. Same results.

Just for kicks, I booted up a 10 year old PPC machine. While the drive did not mount, there was an alert advising that the device was not recognized and offering the option to initialize it. Once all that was done, the drive again works normally.

Had I listened to my new machines, I would have recycled what I thought was worthless drive.

Any guesses why only the old machine brought a bit of joy?


Harv
27" i7 iMac (10.13.6), iPhone Xs Max (12.1)

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. ~Voltaire
Re: Thumb Drive Weirdness
Pendragon #19460 12/03/11 07:53 AM
Joined: Aug 2009
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I had similar problems with a couple of thumb drives.

(1) Pulling my files off my old iMac (OS 9) to put on my new iMac (OS X Lion), I found all sorts of crap (especially with exec files). When I reformatted the drive to a Mac format, all those things disappeared, and transfer proceeded properly.

(2) Using the reformatted drive to get Mac updates and such via a PC connected to Ethernet resulted in the drive's not being recognized and therefore not mounted by the PC. When I reformatted to MS-DOS (FAT32), all proceeded properly.

Moral: Format flash drives to MS-DOS (FAT32) which can be read and mounted by any computer.

Re: Thumb Drive Weirdness
grelber #19496 12/05/11 06:12 PM
Joined: Aug 2009
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Thanks for the input/feedback kind sir.

'Tis just that I wonder why my old machine recognized that something was wrong and offered a solution, whereas, my new gear did no such thing.

Perhaps there is a moral there...


Harv
27" i7 iMac (10.13.6), iPhone Xs Max (12.1)

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. ~Voltaire
Re: Thumb Drive Weirdness
Pendragon #19498 12/05/11 09:50 PM
Joined: Aug 2009
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Next time, if there is a next time, see if Disk Utility or System Information can tell you anything about the format used on the thumb drive, FAT16, FAT32 (MS-DOS), or NTFS and what Partition Map Scheme. I don't have a FAT16 volume around to test with but I would bet it was FAT16. FAT16 has significant limits on file size and the number of files in the top level directory. While I can find nothing official this apple discussion thread suggests FAT16 is no longer supported and I know Apple has not supported formatting a disk in FAT16 for a good number of years.


If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein

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