USB Thumb Drive issues

I have a Macbook Pro running Snow Leopard that seems to have issues with thumb drives.

Twice now, I've had the system lock up after trying to force an dismount of a thumb drive. The system tells me (for 2 hours) that the drive cannot be unmounted, and I finally chose to force it. After doing this, the system became unstable and would not respond (spinning beach-ball every time I tried to do anything) forcing me to do a hard-shutdown to recover.

Just now, I used a borrowed thumb drive and the system mounted it multiple times. There were drive icons spread most of the way across my desktop. The drive does not have multiple partitions. Trying to get the system to unmount the drive was fruitless, as when one icon would go away, another would take it's place. I finally pulled the drive, causing the system to crash. I have the crash report minimized to my dock for when I get to a location with internet (probably back home) to send it.

With the first drive, I used the Disk Utility to verify the drive, and it seemed to fix problems both times. With the borrowed disk, all I did was check it under windows (the drive belongs to one of the companies techs, and we mostly use PC's) and it checked out fine.

At any rate, is there something I should check, or do in this case?


Eric the Grey

Do other USB peripherals work OK on your Mac?

VegasGeorge said:

Do other USB peripherals work OK on your Mac?

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So far. I haven't actually run a backup for a while (not since right after the Snow Leopard upgrade) onto my stand-alone USB Hard drive, but it didn't have that problem. I've a couple of other thumb drives and there have been no problems with them, but I don't use them anywhere near as often (they're older and smaller than my main one).

I don't use any other peripherals other than my mouse and that I just unplug.



Eric the Grey

First up what brand is the thumb drive and is it Mac compatible?

I've notice the irritating practice of some thumb drive manufacturers to include their own software on the drive. If your has such, it might be the cause of your problems. I always delete all that stuff off a new drive, then reformat the drive for the Mac. Maybe that would help.

harryb2448 said:

First up what brand is the thumb drive and is it Mac compatible?

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The drive that mounted more times than I can cound was a Dell, and I think there is actually a problem with it (windows detected some disk errors after the second time I tried to mount it). I suspect it has problems in general.

The other drive I've had problems with does have some security software that runs under windows for encrypting part of the drive. Unfortunately formating for the Mac won't work because I need to transfer files between Win and Mac.


Eric the Grey

Format the thumb drive FAT 32 and it will be recognised by both Windows and Mac. Here is a link:-

Apple - Support - Discussions - How to format a flash drive on my mac ...

KevinMartin said:

Format it with Fat 32 system is the only way.Try it.

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The drives ARE formatted FAT32, because, as you say, that's the only way to transfer files. This is not my problem. I only mentioned formatting because someone said to reformat it on the mac, which would render the drive useless for transferring files between the two.

The problem is, as with the first instance above (I believe the second is a bad drive) drives that do not wish to unmount, and cause the entire system to become unstable when I force the issue.



Eric the Grey