USB Flash Drive Crashing Finder

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Level 1

95 points

USB Flash Drive Crashing Finder

Can someone shed some light on this issue?

I have an Intel iMac on which the Finder crashes every time I try to open it in the Finder following the copy of files to the flash drive. This occurs on both local accounts and network accounts.

I insert the flash drive, drag files to it, they copy just fine, then I try to open the drive to see the files and the Finder crashes. Double click on the flash drive again and the Finder crashes. Double click on the drive again and the Finder crashes, so on and so on. No error message is displayed when the Finder crashes. Everything just disappears from the Desktop and then reappears.

We have tried several flash drives with the same result on all drives.

MBP Core duo, Mac OS X (10.4.9), B&W G4, iMac FP, and a few others

Posted on May 10, 2007 11:54 AM

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Answer 1

May 11, 2007 7:37 AM in response to B Man

Perhaps a stupid question, but did you format the flash drive before you used it? It turns out that certain vendors don't do a great job in QC'ing their product and you get drives with a botched format on them. The practical upshot being that on some systems they function more or less normally, and on others they cause all sorts of bizarre problems.

A symptom is that they drive might be readable or writable with XP, but not Vista. On a Windows PC and not a Mac, etc. SanDisk is a serious offender in this category (lots of messed up mini-Cruzers out there).

The simple fix is copy the files off with another machine. Reformat the USB stick, and copy the files back.

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Answer 2

B Man Author

Level 1

95 points

May 24, 2007 8:22 AM in response to B Man

I resolved this issue by performing an archive and install of the OS.

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