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Can't copy to USB Flash drive

For some reason I can't copy stuff from my Mac to a USB Flash drive.

I have several of them ranging from a few MB to 4 GB. I was able to copy files to them yesterday, but suddenly am no longer able to.

I can plug them into my other Mac and they work fine. Only having problems on this machine.

I also have a several external hard drives, and no problem copying files to them, seems to be only USB Flash drives that are not working.

What happens is, when I try to copy a file I get the progress bar and it sits at zero and says estimated time one minute remaining, but does nothing for hours until I finally go to FORCE QUIT and restart the finder.

If I put a file on the flash drive from another computer, it will copy to this Mac but if I then take the file from the flash drive and drop it in trash and empty trash, I get a similar result with the progress bar - just sits and does nothing till I restart finder.

I used Disk Utility to repair the USB flash drive and to completely reformat it (erase), but still not able to copy even the smallest text file or JPG to it. Works fine on any other machine.

The USB Flash drives are not locked, and are fine as far as I know. I've tried pluging them into different USB ports and, still not working.

I've also run Disk Utility from the StartUp Disk and verified my Mac's Disk, and all seems fine there.

Any suggestions?

iMac Cubicle Partition Model, Mac OS X (10.4.11)

Posted on Jan 13, 2009 10:54 PM

Reply
6 replies

Jan 13, 2009 11:11 PM in response to Jason Rainbows

Hi Jason,

Try it in Safe mode...

Safe Boot , (holding Shift key down at bootup), run Disk Utility in Applications>Utilities, then highlight your drive, click on Repair Permissions, then try it.

If that doesn't help, try reapplying the big Combo update...

The combo update for PowerPC-based Macs...
http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/macosx10411comboupdateppc.html

Repair Permissions before & after re-install, then reboot again each time.

Jan 14, 2009 4:20 PM in response to BDAqua

Not Sure if the "Combo Update" will work since I'm not on a PPC here, and the Flash drives actually work on my PPC Macs.

I was going to do a Repair Permissions, but as I recall, that wasn't available so I did a Repair Disk on it. When that didn't work I pulled an ERASE as MS-DOS on it. I did both of these procedures once while the Mac was booted from the Startup DVD (after checking the Mac's Drive for problems, none found), and again when booted up from the Mac's installed OS.

Can't copy to USB Flash drive

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