[karambos]

Other thread was closed. Hence new one.

I've tried a number of things now and had no success. I connected the USB stick to the back of the mac (in a USB port directly) and THEN booted the computer. I could see it in the Apple System Profiler but nowhere else. I tried booting first. Ditto. Tried same thing in all USB ports (powered hub, keyboard, comuter itself). Same each time. In fact, it shows up in the Apple System Profiler no matter which USB port I connect it to - the computer direct, the keyboard or my powered hub.

The option to turn the display of volumes on the desktop is turned ON.

The drive itself is switched ON.

The drive can't have expired, it's brand new.

If I open Disk Utility I see absolutely nada. No hard drives, no usb drives. Zilch. It just says "Select a disk or volume" but there is nothing in the list, not even my hard drives.

When I pull the USB stick OUT again I always get this message: "You have attached a drive that is not compatible with OSX. To continue with drive inserted click ignore".

Incidentally, I can access the drive under windoze and I can save things on it and delete them. I can also reformat it. The choices are FAT, NTFS or FAT32. Would reformatting ithe drive on a windoze machine help matters?

I am, as always, grateful for any help on this issue.

[DeathToWindows]

Yeah, this sounds like a flash drive being pissy... reformat it. NFTS or FAT32 should work (I believe OS X can work with both)... when it shows up in Disc Utility, format it back to Mac (PC/mac format drives don't generally, in my experiance, jump platform well...)

I also assume you've rebooted and tried the usual... if not, flash the PRAM and the NVRAM.

[karambos]

My hard drives are showing up in Disk Utility. And I admit I haven't flashed the PRAM or NVRAM yet as I'm not sure how to. Will find out and do that, though.

I now have the following peripheral drives attached:

i) A LaCie 3.5" floppy drive attached to the computer via the USB port at the back
ii) a Iomega 1GB JAZ drive attached to the computer via a Adaptec SCSI connect 2906 PCI card
iii) this pesky flash drive attached to the computer via powered hub and formatted to FAT32.

I put a disk in the floppy and the JAZ and attached the flash drive. None showed up on the desktop. However, in the SYSTEM PROFILER the floppy and the flash drive show up but not the JAZ.

I booted to install disk and opened DISK UTILITY. After a while, it saw the JAZ drive (and the inserted disk) so I clicked VERIFY DISK. After 5-6 minutes of spinning beach ball cursor, it verified the JAZ drive in about 2 seconds and suddenly my flash drive appeared. Normally it displays a drive size and a drive name. With the flash it just displayed the drive size hence DRIVE PERMISSIONS is not active. I clicked on the flash drive icon and got spinning beach ball cursor for about 20 minutes. This is not an exaggeration. I went to the PARTITION tab and all the clickable items were inactive and at the bottom it said "cannot initialise a read only disk"

I restarted the computer and still none of them showed up on the desktop

QUESTION 1: How do I initialise
a)the flash drive
b)the floppy

QUESTION 2: How do I get any of them to appear on the desktop?