Originally Posted by Targon
When i tried to delete them the system would not let me, the message 'this file cannot be deleted as it is being used by application OS X' was displayed.
If you use the terminal and do rm and drag the file in then it should delete it. I find that sometimes secure delete ignores the file being in use when you know it clearly isn't.
Originally Posted by Targon
Anyone experienced this situation or something similar where the machine loops uncontrollably out during a copy operation?
Yeah but while burning a CD. All you have to do is pull out the device. I pulled out the firewire cable of my burner. It gives the warning about removing a device but since the machine was hung, it is unlikely it was doing anything with the drive. I've done the same thing with an external firewire hard drive without any problems.
Originally Posted by Targon
I am curious as to what exactly had caused this problem. I suspect a corrupt file on the flash drive. Questions here are could the PC have corrupted them in the copy from the PC, or did the Mac corrupt the files when the device was connected to the Mac. Or was it possibly NOT the result of a corrupt file?
It could be that the built-in driver had problems with the device. What happened with my external firewire hard drive was that there was a loose power cable or ide cable. It wasn't enough to unmount the device but it obviously caused a problem because it started hanging stuff up progressively like the Finder. Pulling it out freed everything up instantly.
Originally Posted by Targon
Would it not have been better for the System to simply 'Skip' the corrupt files from the copy operation and continue to copy the rest of the good files across and then report at the end of the operation or in realtime 'x.file, y.file and z.file were not able to be copied due to possible file corruption' while the system still stayed online and behaved sensibly.
I agree but I think the problem is that devices are operating on probably the lowest level of your system.This is outside the system's ability to protect from it. It's the same reason why you can get kernel panics. I wish they'd put that stuff in some sort of protective layer too because even 3rd party devices like my belkin wireless adaptor puts its extensions in the system folder. The OS X system is not supposed to have 3rd party stuff installed in it.
What really needs to happen is a major rethink of the way the system is designed so that kernel panics and hang ups are a thing of the past.
BTW, if you want to impress you dad, try opening 20 programs under Windows and then switch users and watch the system die. Do the same thing on OS X. OS X"s memory management is far better than Windows.
I don't know why that happens - poetic justice perhaps - but a PC user tried doing the same thing to me to convince me why Windows was better. He was showing me a graphics demo and then he tried to close the program and it froze on screen. This was under XP and he couldn't get rid of the program. He even admitted that it happened a few times.
One time I used Windows to install the Windows equivalent of toast and it made the system unbootable. On OS X, Toast is just a drag and drop app.
I was also trying to set up one of my relative's PCs and something got stuck in the print queue. According to Microsoft, the way to resolve this issue is to kill the print spooler, which inadvertently means you have to restart the system. Just to flush the print queue!
Irrespective of what happened that time, you are far better off with OS X than Windows. The main reason that you don't hear about the problems with Windows is that the users are accustomed to things going wrong regularly that they don't talk about it
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