Filed under: Peripherals, Tips and tricks, Troubleshooting
Help with USB problems
I have found that strange USB problems creep up occasionally, often with no obvious cause (see, for instance, this week's Ask TUAW comments). I myself have a USB hard drive that sometimes just randomly disappears from my desktop and I have heard quite a few other folks report similar problems. Well MacFixIt has a nice tutorial up that offers some good suggestions from the obvious (unplug and replug) to the not so obvious (replace the relevant kernel extensions). So if you've ever had USB problems, this would be a good one to file away for future reference.[via MacVolPlace]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Michael L. said 1:13PM on 8-26-2007
Any suggestions for speeding up the ejection of a USB memory-stick? I wait and wait, and I still get the warning message. I've looked online with no success. Could the slowness be related to BlueHarvest (zapping Trashes and .DS_Stores)?
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Lucas Couvreur said 1:14PM on 8-26-2007
Yeah I also have this problem. Sometimes, less than in OS X 10.4.9 and earlier.
I can repair it with diskutilities,after 10min.
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wildcardd said 5:37PM on 8-26-2007
Occasionally my mouse gets all freaky. It appears to be random, but buttons switch, scroll doesn't work, etc. I just unplug and plug back in and all is well.
Oddities with the usb port.
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thekevinmonster said 10:21PM on 8-26-2007
One thing I've noticed is that if you put a cell phone too close to your mouse/keyboard, when the radio 'chirps' (that thing where you hear the BZZT BZZT BZZZZT in your speakers), it wigs out the USB interface. It makes my Microsoft mouse become unresponsive until I reconnect it, and makes my USB memory stick unmount and remount.
just a random comment.
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harshey said 9:49AM on 8-27-2007
Well I have problem with my USB hard drive when I forget to eject it and just pull it from the mac... after that no matter what I do it will not recognize it... So I just plug it to my windows desktop and delete the .DS_Store file and plug it back to the mac... and it works
And everytime I do it I hate the fact that I have to rely on my windows desktop to get a simple USB hard drive working on my mac...
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Lee said 11:34AM on 8-27-2007
This is why FireWire is superior for mass storage. Fewer problems and more consistent speed.
USB is great for peripherals and flash disks, but for a solid external drive, Firewire is the way to go.
"But PC's don't always have Firewire!" Ah, that's why you get a portable drive with both USB2 and Firewire.
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robbneu said 12:45PM on 8-27-2007
I had some really problems getting my MBP to recognize my external USB drive. It happened with the 10.4.10 update. I ended up taking the computer and drive to the Genius Bar and the only thing the genius came up with was rolling my OS back. So, I'm still running 10.4.9 and the drive is working great. :/
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Jonathan Piccolo said 1:47PM on 8-27-2007
@thekevinmonster
I have to agree. I've definitely linked USB drives disappearing off my desktop with my phone being near them. If I keep my phone at a distance or turn it around so the antennae is pointing a different direction the problems disappear (rather than the drives!).
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