Hi Christine, If this is a USB flash drive or memory stick you should not have to format or otherwise activate it. If this is a new hard drive, depending on the format, you may or may not want, or have to format (or reformat) the drive with Disk Utility. What you decide to do depends on how you plan to use the drive, and whether you need to both read and write to it from different operating systems, or just plan to use it with your Mac, and the issue here is that, without additional software, Windows file systems can't read the default Mac file system file formats.
Since, from your subject line, you are using a USB flash drive, I'll add a suggestion to the good recommendations you've had from Zack and Ricardo. If you can't find the drive on your Desktop, and Carolyn's suggestion of looking in Finder on your computer (Command+Shift+C) doesn't work, try the keyboard shortcut in Finder of Command+Shift+G (for "Go to Folder"). In the text box of the dialog window that appears when you issue this command, type or paste in: "/Volumes" without the surrounding quotation marks, but with the slash mark at the beginning, and using a capital "V" for "Volumes", then press Return. This should show you all mounted volumes that are attached to your computer in your Finder window. One of them will be "Macintosh HD", which is your main hard drive. Another should be the name of your USB flash drive (e.g., "Lexar", "Crucial", or "Untitled"), which you can then select. This method (pressing Command+Shift+G and then going to the "/Volumes" folder in Finder) works for me in the very few instances where an attached drive is mounted on the system, but for some reason the graphical user interface (GUI) doesn't update the information. The Finder view is a little simpler with this command than what is displayed with Command+Shift+C (which, as Carolyn explained, shows the top level of your Computer), because it doesn't include network connections. Remember that you have to exit the files on the attached USB drive before ejecting it. That means that you cannot have any of the files open in another application (e.g., be viewing one of the files on the drive in TextEdit), and you should navigate to the top level of the device in the Finder window (use Command+Up arrow to move up levels). Then you can use Command+E to eject the attached USB flash drive and remove it safely from the USB port on your computer. HTH. Cheers, Esther On Jun 7, 2011, at 16:27, Christine Grassman wrote: > I did check that external disks were checked in Finder preferences to show on > the desktop, but the only untitled folder there is not the disk. I can't > find anything to activate the disk. Is there something else I can try -- is > it possible I have to format it or something? It's brand-new. > On Jun 7, 2011, at 10:08 PM, Zachary Kline wrote: > >> Hi Christine, >> When you insert the drive an icon will appear on the desktop, which you can >> then open. It might be labeled as Untitled or similar, depending on whether >> the drive has a volume label or not. You open this with command-o, and then >> can copy files to it by, for instance, opening a new Finder window with >> command-n and navigating to where ever you want to copy from. To remove the >> drive, first eject it with command-e on its icon. >> Hope this helps, >> Zack. >> On Jun 7, 2011, at 7:05 PM, Christine Grassman wrote: >> >>> Hi, everyone, I'm really confused right now. I placed a new drive into the >>> USB port and expected some sort of dialog box or alert telling me it was >>> available; I want to copy music files onto it. Nothing, and I can't figure >>> out how to locate it, the way I used to on a PC using "my computer". What >>> must I do? (I did try removing it, and I got the alert that it was not >>> removed safely, but it doesn't seem to notice when I insert it.) >>> Christine >>> -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en.
