# USB Stick drive does not show up on desktop



## karambos (Sep 1, 2004)

Mac G4 MDD, dual 1GHz, 1,25GB RAM, OS10.2.8 

I tried connecting a USB/mp3 player stick drive thing to the USB port on my keyboard today. I assume a drive icon normally appears on the desktop which didn't happen. So I checked in the System Profiler and it recognised the drive, where it was attached, the name of the retailer, drive number, memory etc. The system Profiler seemed to know quite a lot about my drive. Sadly, I couldn't access it, though. 

Am I looking in the wrong place under OS10.2.8? It worked fine under Mac OS9 - I used to just attached it the the keyboard usb port and a drive icon appeared. The USB stick thingy came with a CD but only contained WIN98 drivers. Couldn't find a webpage for them but assume there is no mac support. 

I'd be grateful for any ideas/tips/help


----------



## zoombini (Aug 18, 2003)

I know it sounds obvious, but have u tried a different USB port and re-booted??? Some flash drive are a bit flaky under OS X. It should show up on the desktop. Try flashing the PRAM and rebuilding the desktop to see if that makes any difference. It might be worth finding the website and seeing if theres a patch for x.2.8 - that may be the problem.


----------



## karambos (Sep 1, 2004)

My hard drives are showing up in Disk Utility. And I have to admit to having flashed neither the PRAM nor the NVRAM simply because I don't know how to do it. There is no website for this company.

I now have the following peripheral drives attached:

*i)* A LaCie 3.5" *floppy drive* attached to the computer via the USB port at the back
*ii)* a Iomega 1GB *JAZ drive* attached to the computer via a Adaptec SCSI connect 2906 PCI card
*iii)* this pesky *flash drive* attached to the computer via powered hub and formatted to FAT32.

I put a disk in the floppy and the JAZ and attached the flash drive. None showed up on the desktop. However, in the SYSTEM PROFILER the floppy and the flash drive show up but not the JAZ.

I booted to install disk and opened DISK UTILITY. After a while, it saw the JAZ drive (and the inserted disk) so I clicked VERIFY DISK. After 5-6 minutes of spinning beach ball cursor, it verified the JAZ drive in about 2 seconds and suddenly my flash drive appeared. Normally it displays a drive *size* and a drive *name*. With the flash it just displayed the drive size hence DRIVE PERMISSIONS is not active. I clicked on the flash drive icon and got spinning beach ball cursor for about 20 minutes. This is not an exaggeration. I went to the PARTITION tab and all the clickable items were inactive and at the bottom it said "cannot initialise a read only disk"

I restarted the computer and still none of them showed up on the desktop

QUESTION 1: How do I initialise
a)the flash drive
b)the floppy

QUESTION 2: How do I get any of them to appear on the desktop?


----------

