issue with mounting USB drives?

[scottmso]

hey all! I have a MacBook with OS X 10.5.5. Whenever I plug in a USB hard drive, it will often show activity for several minutes and be recognized by the system (ie in System Profiler) but refuse to mount the volume until a few minutes.

It's a bit annoying...are there any potential causes of this? I was thinking it was the Spotlight service possibly, but wouldn't it be mounted if Spotlight was doing something with it? Also, this particular drive is a FAT32 drive if that matters.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

 

[TheLordsServant]

I had this problem, but I was running 10.4 at the time on a MDD. Turns out my OS had gotten corrupted by something I installed, and ended up having to reinstall the OS. I tried everything else that I could think of. You could try resetting the System Management Controller, see if that changes anything. Here's an Apple document on how to do it:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1411

 

[KaosDG]

Does the drive work OK in other systems?

Check in the terminal, if it's mounted (issue a "mount" command to see whats currently mounted)

if it shows up and gives a path, cd to that path and see if you can see the files.

I had an issue once where a hidden file on the root of my drive prevented the drive from showing up in the Finder, but that was WAAAAY back in 10.1