USB drive not recognized in Disk Utility

Running Mavericks on an '09 iMac. The superdrive is not functional. I installed a USB burner which works fine with iTunes, but is not recognized in Disk Utility. Is there a "fix" for this issue. Any thoughts on the subject will be appreciated. Thanks for looking.

Do you have a disc in the drive while running Disc Utility? If there is no disc I don't think it appears at all if there dis no disc.

+1. I can verify what Slydude stated as true. My 2013 iMac has no optical drive but I use two different external drives. Neither one will show up in Disk Utility or on the desktop unless a disk is inserted. And by the way, I also have a USB floppy drive (yeah I know...) that acts the same way until a floppy disk is inserted.

Wow!!! That was the quickest, easiest fix ever. You're totally correct. Many thanks. I've been scratching my head over this one.

As the others said, all you get is the desktop icon and when a disc is inserted, check DU.

Understood. Takes me a bit longer to sort things out, being new to Macs.

chscag said:

+1. I can verify what Slydude stated as true. My 2013 iMac has no optical drive but I use two different external drives. Neither one will show up in Disk Utility or on the desktop unless a disk is inserted. And by the way, I also have a USB floppy drive (yeah I know...) that acts the same way until a floppy disk is inserted.

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Wow you still have a floppy drive. I had one of those for my old G3 iMac. Is it the Apple USB powered one that looks like it's coated in grey stripey plastic? And I hesitate to ask but what do you use it for?

I know this has nothing to do with this post but on the subject of relics does anybody have a 20th Anniversary Mac? This was without a doubt the strangest mac ever made. And at the time retailed for over $7,000.00 dollars.

Rod Sprague said:

Wow you still have a floppy drive. I had one of those for my old G3 iMac. Is it the Apple USB powered one that looks like it's coated in grey stripey plastic? And I hesitate to ask but what do you use it for?

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Actually, it's a Sony USB 2.0 bus powered floppy drive designed for use with a Mac or a PC. The drive is a left over from the PC (Dell desktop) that I used at our office. We no longer have the Dell and the lease expired on the office we were renting. I did get use out of the drive as we had many older Word and text files that were archived to 3.5" 1.44 MB floppies. I copied them from the floppies on to the Mac and eventually to CDs.

I have a USB Imation floppy drive. Thought it was a Sony but I just checked.