HELP! USB Drive not Mounting

showngo · #1 April 9th, 2004, 11:20 PM

I recently was given an MPIO HS100 usb flash drive as a gift. It is a 1.5gb pen drive, its a pretty nice little unit. USB 2.0 compatible. It works perfectly with Windows (after installed a bunch of drivers) but i can not get my mac to detect or mount the drive. I have never used a USB drive with a Mac before so maybe i am missing something. Please help me i would like to be able to use this drive. The wite for the drive says that it will work with Mac OS 8 and later.

Equipment: 12" Powerbook G4 1ghz, 40gig, 256mb. Mac OS X 10.3

Thank you in advance!

DeltaMac · #2 April 10th, 2004, 12:07 PM

Things to check:
Is the device seen in your System Profiler?
Do you see the drive listed in Disk Utility? - The hard drive in this device comes formatted as Fat32, which SHOULD work in Panther, but if it is seen in Disk Utility, and will not mount, then you could try formatting, either as a MS-DOS drive, which would make it FAT16, I think. OR - if you are NOT going to use it in a PC, it could be formatted as a MacOS Extended volume.

If not seen at all by the Mac, try plugging directly into the Mac (no hub), OR try a good USB 2.0 hub, such as one from d-link.

showngo · #3 April 10th, 2004, 02:05 PM

Thank you for your reply. Ii checked what you siad to, it is seen in the system profiler under the USB and it registers the correct name for the device. It is NOT seen in the disk utility however. Also it does not make any difference when i tried it with a USB hub. Any other thoughts?

Thank you.

Quote:

Originally Posted by DeltaMac

Things to check:
Is the device seen in your System Profiler?
Do you see the drive listed in Disk Utility? - The hard drive in this device comes formatted as Fat32, which SHOULD work in Panther, but if it is seen in Disk Utility, and will not mount, then you could try formatting, either as a MS-DOS drive, which would make it FAT16, I think. OR - if you are NOT going to use it in a PC, it could be formatted as a MacOS Extended volume.

If not seen at all by the Mac, try plugging directly into the Mac (no hub), OR try a good USB 2.0 hub, such as one from d-link.

DeltaMac · #4 April 10th, 2004, 03:32 PM

Boot to your OS X installer (DVD?) that came with your system. Leave the MPIO device plugged in. At the first screen, go to the Installer menu, and choose Disk Utility. Does the MPIO drive show up there? If so, then something about your software is not allowing mounting of the device. You can try formatting the drive there. If still nothing, then the device is just not compatible (regardless of what the manufacturer says), but try contacting the manufacturer...

showngo · #5 April 10th, 2004, 03:46 PM

Just tried doing it that way, did not show up there on the disk utility. I guess that means that it is not compatible. Oh Well. Thanks for all your help DeltaMac. If you think of anything else let me know, ill try just about anything....

Quote:

Originally Posted by DeltaMac

Boot to your OS X installer (DVD?) that came with your system. Leave the MPIO device plugged in. At the first screen, go to the Installer menu, and choose Disk Utility. Does the MPIO drive show up there? If so, then something about your software is not allowing mounting of the device. You can try formatting the drive there. If still nothing, then the device is just not compatible (regardless of what the manufacturer says), but try contacting the manufacturer...

brianh · #6 April 10th, 2004, 07:51 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by showngo

Just tried doing it that way, did not show up there on the disk utility. I guess that means that it is not compatible. Oh Well. Thanks for all your help DeltaMac. If you think of anything else let me know, ill try just about anything....

brianh · #7 April 10th, 2004, 07:57 PM

I have the same problem with an external usb hard drive. I was using it for backup on an old G3 iMac. I bought a new G5 1.8 and tried to transfer files from the old to the new. The drive doesn't show-up on the desktop but is in the system profiler. The Apple tech suggested trashing some extensions and eventually re-installing OSX. The drive still won't mount.
I guess I will have to go to plan b and backup to a cd instead of using the usb drive.

scottygish · #8 April 12th, 2004, 12:54 PM

I had trouble with this as well and after a little playing around found the easy fix. The key drive I had would not work through the keyboard USB, (apparently not enough power), but works fine plugged into the back of the computer. Hopefully this easy fix works for you...

Scott