Thumb drive weirdness

I've been experiencing some odd things with the way my brand-new Mini seems to relate to thumb drives. For one thing, it fails to load my SanDisc thumb drive's icon on the Desktop, although it sees it perfectly well in the Finder and I have no trouble using the thing. Meanwhile, my old PPC Mini continues to load the SanDisc icon on the Desktop... Also, while my new Mini DOES load my PNY thumb drive's icon on the Desktop, whenever i go to eject the drive, I get the message that I can't eject it because it's using an application -- even if I haven't done anything with it other than plug it into the port!

Can anyone help me troubleshoot this weirdness? I rebooted the Mini, but that didn't change anything.

The weirdest part is how one thumb drive will appear on the desktop, but not another. It's not the USB ports -- I swapped ports between the drives and got the same result. Could the SanDisk be aged or corrupted in some way that annoys my new Mini but not my old PPC Mini?

External Discs is checked -- and like I was saying, it's only one thumb drive in particular that doesn't show up on the new Mini's desktop (other external drives display their icons as usual). It DOES, however, show up on my old Mini's desktop...that's why it's so bizarre and confusing....

firedept said:

Strange. Wish I could have helped. Just taking a guess here, could it be a format issue? This is purely a wild guess on my part though.

Click to expand...

No, it's a FAT32 drive that has always worked just fine. No folders larger than 4G.

I don't really mind if it's just a strange glitch involving one particular piece of hardware; it's just that when you have a new computer (which is still being paid for) and unexplainable things start happening, you kind of wonder if there's some lurking defect somewhere in the works....