Flash drive strangeness

[Don C]

We were given the presentation Powerpoint files at a conference this week on a flash drive. Inexpensive one to be sure. The first time I plugged it into my year old MacBook Pro, it mounted on the desktop. I looked over the files and ejected it. A short time later I put it back in and got a "cannot mount" error message. Tried the other port and got the same message.

Eventually, I restarted the MBP and while it was down, inserted the flash drive and when the desktop came up, the drive was there. I took advantage of that and copied the files over to the internal drive. Ejected the flash drive. Next time I inserted it, got the error message.

Person next to me never got either her flash drive nor mine to mount on her G4 PowerBook. She had a different flash drive in her purse and I copied the files from my hard drive to her other flash, so she was fine as far as getting the files. But there was agreement among others that this must be a "mac thing" confirming in their minds the inferiority of the platform.

Hoping to determine what was going on, I walked over to the MacStore (Bethesda) and the gal at the door pretty much told me that she had no interest in helping me. The Genius bar was solidly booked so I just walked around the store and popped the flash drive into various machines. It mounted on some, failed to mount on others. None of the plastic MacBooks could mount it; some, but not all of the MBP's could mount it. (When it DID mount, I was careful to eject it by dragging the icon to the trash and waiting for it to dismount.)

What's going on here? Power available to the USB ports differing from machine to machine? Why would it work on mine when I rebooted but not otherwise?

TIA

[space-time]

does it mount on ALL windows machines? maybe the drive is defective and it has nothing to do with the OS X.

If you do find a OS X machine where it mounts, does it mount all the time? plug in and eject 10x . Now do the same on a machine where it does not mount.

[rgG]

If you ever get it to mount on your computer, I would erase and reformat the drive with Disc Utility and see if that helps.

[Don C]

Nobody in the room with Windows machines commented on being unable to use the flash drives that they had. I did not check the Mac users (there were several) but did not hear anyone commenting on being able to use the drive, but they could have and I did not know about it.

I can insert it 10 times in either USB port on my MBP and get the failure. I have not tried the rebooting with the drive in 10 times, nor do I have access to the other MPB G4 involved.

Disk Utility sees the drive and calls it unformatted and will neither repair nor verify the disk. BTW: it is a 3.7GB Kingston DataTraveler 2.0 Media according to Disk Utility.

Since I was able to get the files that one time, there is not a lot of fixing of this specific flash drive that I need to do (e.g. reformatting it) but I am trying to figure out why some machines can open the files and some cannot. I'll be getting another similar drive (different files) from the same people in November, so it would be nice to know what's going on here.