Mac OSX tiger not reading USB flash drives...??

[Joeytpg]

I need some help please.

Both me and my girlfriend have Macbooks (c2d) and we're both running Mac OS X Tiger and we've been having problems reading a few usb flash drives. It all started when my girl tried to load her usb flash drive the other day, and it would mount on the desktop, neither on her Macbook nor mine, we used to be able to mount it before so, this is new. She then went to uni and tried opening it on a PC and it worked.

Then later today, a friend of hers came by the work on some uni work, and same thing happened, we tried to load her friend's usb flash drive, and it didn't mount (on both macbooks).

Our usb ports are working because we can charge the ipod and use external mice and stuff.

For the record, on both usb flash drives (my girlfriend's and her friend) have Windows files on them, along with mac os x files too.

any ideas? I tried repairing permissions but it didn't work.

 

[aross99]

Any idea how the drives were formatted? Windows usually uses something like FAT32 for flash drives. Not sure if you would be able to read one that was formatted with NTFS, although I would think you could. HFS+ works best for Mac's, but Windows machines can't read them without special software.

Do you have ANY flash drives you can read? If you have one that doesn't work that you can experiment on, try reformatting it as FAT32 (note that this will erase any files on the flash drive) and see if it works.

You can format the flash drive using Disk Utility in the /Applications/Utilities folder.

 

[Joeytpg]

Any idea how the drives were formatted? Windows usually uses something like FAT32 for flash drives. Not sure if you would be able to read one that was formatted with NTFS, although I would think you could. HFS+ works best for Mac's, but Windows machines can't read them without special software.

Do you have ANY flash drives you can read? If you have one that doesn't work that you can experiment on, try reformatting it as FAT32 (note that this will erase any files on the flash drive) and see if it works.

You can format the flash drive using Disk Utility in the /Applications/Utilities folder.

yeah I have other drives that work. I'll have to try what you suggested.

But what's weird to me is that the drives USED to work before.