usb floppy drive won't mount

Max,

Could you please give a little more information. Which version of MacBook Pro do you have, PPC or Intel? Which smartdisk USB drive do you have?

When you say that you are not sure if it is even in the system profiler, will system profiler show a manufacturer ID and other similar information? If it shows a company name, then the device has been seen but the media has not mounted.

Have you opened Disk Utility in the Utilities folder in Applications? Have you inserted a blank disk to see if it will trigger a message like 'this disk is not readable, do you want to initialize?'

Just some thoughts to dial in on what we are working with.

Ji~m

In looking at the reviews for that drive, I came across this information:

OS Required: Microsoft Windows 98, Apple MacOS 8.6, Apple MacOS 9.x, Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition / Windows ME, Microsoft Windows 2000 / XP

What does your owner's manual say? Is the drive not OS X compatible?

max916 wrote:

I connected it to a PC and it worked but wanted to initialize the disks.

Before we solve the mounting problem... what kind of floppy diskette do you want to read, exactly? Is it HD or DD? If it's DD or 800k, it's not going to work in a USB drive no matter what.

max916 wrote:

All my disks are Sony MFD-2HD, Maxell mf2HD, Sony MFD-2HD, JVC MF-2HD, FUJIFILM 2HD, Verbatim Datalife MF 2HD, and 3M High Density 1.44.

Ok, they'll work fine in your USB drive then. Now, two ideas, depending on what you really want to do:

1. You said the drive works on your PC. You can just format them on the PC if that's the case...
   FORMAT A: /FS:FAT
2. Plug the drive into the Mac and bring up Disk Utilities (Applications->Utilities->Disk Utility.app) and see if it shows up in the set of drives on the left hand side. You should be able to highlight the drive and format from there. If it doesn't show up, then maybe it's not supported in OSX... but that's pretty unlikely. I have an ancient USB drive I bought with my iMac back in OS9 days, and it works fine in OSX and PCs alike. They're pretty universally supported.

Hi,

Could it be a power problem? The USB port is per se standardised, but sometimes the power is not enough anyway. If so, you could try a powered USB hub.

Otherwise, since the drive works with a PC, an alternative could possibly be a Windows program for Mac disks (such as TransMac).

Jan

Max,

It might be worth checking with someone else who has a Mac to try your USB drive on their equipment.

"I also Don't want to destroy the information on the disks by reformatting them. I want to get the information off of them."

It is not uncommon for one of our older computers to not recognize a disk. We take that disk to another computer and it reads the disk just fine. So, guard the disks until you find something that reads them.

Back to the issue of having the drive show up in system profiler. Do you know anyone who has an older Mac? Do you know of a Mac User group near you? Are there any system files that should have been installed before attaching the drive? Grasping at straws here without having other equipment to test the disks.

You said that the PC will recognize the drive but wants to format them. Have you tried putting new, blank disks into the drive while it is connected to a PC? Will all read, write and format functions of the drive work on the PC side? If so, then you should try the drive on someone else's Mac and see if the error is just with your model and system configuration.

Experiment and look for a user group. The key is to find a drive that will see the disks get the files to a hard drive.

It may be time to seek professional services if you can't find a user group nearby.

THANKS! Your suggestion worked for me. (powered usb hub) Thanks for the help.