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Unable to Format/Use Transcend's 8GB Flash Drive

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preshit

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 7, 2009
5
0
Hey folks,

I was recently gifted an 8gig Transcend Flash Drive by a friend. When I inserted the drive into my unibody MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard, it pops up a window that says:

The disk you inserted was not readable by thing computer

Initialize / Ignore / Eject

Clicking on Initialize takes me to Disk utility and if I try to format the drive. it gives me an error that says:

Partition failed - POSIX reports: Cannot allocate memory.

I then take the drive to a Mac that's running Leopard, but the same thing happens there as well, except the error when formatting tells me it's an 'Input / Output error'

On both the Macs, I've tried formatting with a GUID and MBR, but neither works. I've tried to format it as Free Space/MS-DOS format or even the native Mac OS Extended, but nothing works.

--

Now, before you come to the conclusion that it may be a faulty thumb drive, I need to tell you that the drive works perfectly fine on a PC. I've tried it on 3 different PCs, running XP, 7 and Ubuntu respectively. All the tree are capable of detecting, mounting the drive and read/write it just fine. I could even format the drive just fine on all three computers.

What's more, I installed Mac Drive on a XP machine and it could format the drive as HFS+ too.

This thing is driving me nuts for the past 12 hours and I'm out of solutions what to do.

Any help would be really appreciated.

Thanks

-preshit
 
V

Verdanice

macrumors regular
Aug 13, 2007
121
0
I'm having the same issue, with multiple drives.. one or two USB keys over the last couple weeks I've had to unplug/replug 2-3 times before they mount, and I have three external hard drives two of which won't mount at all (the error you outlined) and one was touchy for a week or so and now won't mount like the others, and that's as a problem as the latter is my Time machine disk.

Help would be greatly appreciated, I'd never had these problems under 10.5 working with a ton of USB flash drives and external hard drives.
 
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Buzz Bumble

Guest
Oct 19, 2008
802
2
New Zealand
It could be that the drive needs more power - if you're using the keyboard USB ports on a desktop Mac (or external laptop keyboard), try plugging it directly into the computer's own USB ports.
 
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oldefixuser

macrumors newbie
Sep 28, 2009
1
0
usb problems

I am having some wonky things go on here...

dual layer disks burn fine
single layer dvd disks burn fine if using a small .dmg
single layer dvd disks fail near end of burn if using a large .dmg file

I've experienced a couple of errors while formatting two of my usb keys (128mb and a 512mb) that I want to install chameleon 2.0rc2 with the rc3 upgrade (an excellent boot loader that I prefer over using apple's bootcamp). I eventually managed to get them to format... persistence, i guess. Neither key had been used for maybe 4 or 5 months if that makes a difference.

The reason that I mentioned the above problems, is to let you know that when I try to install chameleon on a single partition usb key (both 128mb or 512mb), the install fails right near the end.

I am wondering if all of these problems and the ones you are having aren't an apple issue rather than a problem created on our respective ends.

I have seen users in the osx86 community complaining of similar issues. It seems to be happening to quite a few people, regardless of whether or not they are running a Mac or a Hack.

Does this help to perpetuate conversation?


oldefixuser
 
A

ajac

macrumors newbie
Sep 24, 2009
1
0
Same exact issue. In my case, I could to format it using the disk utility on a MAC OS boot disk and was able to write data to it. However, few days later it has started giving the same problem again.
 
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