When inserting a Flash Drive to MacBook Air, nothing happens!!!

I have inserted a flash drive in usb of my new mac. I cannot find the link to access the usb

It works because I took the usb out and it told me I took it out without closing it but I dont know how to find the link to open it

You can get the icon to appear on the desktop in Finders menubar, Finder > Preferences > General tab > check them all.

Then double click the desktop icon to see what you have.

Does it mount on your Desktop? What exactly did you expect would happen?

Do you know how this device was formatted and on what type of machine? It sounds like an incompatible format although Macs can read NTFS and FAT formatted drives. It cannot read a Linux format, however.

A couple of things to try. First, if you haven't done so, insert it in the other USB port to see if you get a different result. It's possible there may be an issue with one of the ports, and inserting it into the other might correct the problem. If it's plugged into a hub, unplug the hub and plug it into the Air to eliminate an issue there.

If that doesn't solve it, next fire up Disk Utility (from the utilities menu) and see if that sees a device out there, even if the drive isn't mounting. If it shows a disk and an image, try clicking on the "Mount" button to see if you can get it mount that way. While it should mount automatically, you can at least see if it appears mountable.

If it doesn't show there, then the next step would be to see if the Mac sees a device of any sort when it is plugged in. To find that out, go to About this Mac, More Info., System Report (if you aren't on Lion as I recall you'll get the System Report from the initial screen). Click on USB and take a look at devices. You may want to do it first without the flash drive in the machine and take a look at the list. Now exit System Report, plug in the drive and after waiting a minute or so go back in and see if the list of devices has changed.

It is possible the flash drive of videos has some sort of "protection" scheme that might have a Windows program run on connection that gives access to the videos. If you can't copy the videos to another device (which would be one obvious solution if the Mac sees other drives) then I'd really suspect some sort of protection scheme in place. The other alternative is that the drive is one of those drives meant to encrypt the contents that may run a program on connection to a Windows machine that enables the machine to see the partition that is initially hidden. Note that in either case what *might* show in Disk Utility or on the desktop is an item masquerading as a CD or DVD, which would contain the Windows software that would boot to "open up" the hidden contents on a Windows machine.