OSX can't see flash drive

Howdy all,

So I have this 4gig A-data flash drive. I keep a lot of stuff on it, like portable thunderbird, and some animation files.

So the other day, I'm copying a file to it from my mac, and the copy just froze at 0%. I had to reboot the mac to get the finder working again. But after a reboot, the mac won't see the drive *at all* -- not in the finder, not with disk utility, not with TechTool Pro. The only way you'd know it was plugged in would be to look at the system profiler.

So I stuck it in an WinXP box, which recognized the 'removable disk E:' as soon as I plugged it in, but wouldn't let me open or format it. It just kept asking me to 'insert a disk in drive E:' when I clicked on the drive. Weird, huh?

Is there any hope for me to be able to salvage the drive and (more importantly) my data? I'd hate to lose all my email and stuff. Since the system profiler sees it, I'm hoping there might be some unix tools that will get me into the disk.

Thanks for any help

-Snakey

In a last ditch effort, I installed USB Prober, and got this error when inserting the flash drive (with similar errors when plugged directly into the mac -- so I know it's not the hub.)


:

343.493 [1] [0x22f0a00] The IOUSBFamily is having trouble enumerating a USB device that has been plugged in. It will keep retrying. (Port 3 of hub @ location: 0x9100000)

:

Does this give anybody any ideas? Anyone?

I wonder if the crash during copying erased/damaged your drive. Have you tried to reformat the flash drive?

I don't know how to do a reformat under these conditions where disk utility doesn't see the drive. I would be grateful for any tips and tricks you have, to make the disk usable again.

Do you have the same error if you use a USB 1 Port on the keyboard?

Also you could try to connect the Flash Drive before starting the Mac.

Thanks, guys, for the suggestions. However, unplugging/replugging, switching which port the drive is plugged into, starting up with the drive plugged in, and all the other usual voodoo tricks are just not cutting it this time. This problem seems a bit more serious.

That's why I posted the log from USB prober above. Does anybody know what is involved in 'enumerating' a USB disk? If I could get past that step, maybe I could mount the drive and get my data off the thing. I'm not afraid of the terminal, either, so any UNIX people out there with any ideas feel free to chime in.