Bad Wired, no cookie

I got some junk mail recently advertising the Web 2.0 Expo.

I called O’Reilly. They removed me from their list. I wanted to find out how they got my name.
Customer service put me through to the conference publicist.
The conference publicist put me through to conference marketing.
Conference marketing sent me to CMP database marketing.
CMP’s director of audience development removed me from CMP’s list.
CMP database marketing told me they got my name and address from…Wired.
This absolutely needs to be opt-in, not opt-out.

Bad Wired. No cookie.

Troubleshooting a SanDisk SDDR-95 reader whose cards won’t mount

Say you have a SanDisk ImageMate (SDDR-95) USB 2.0 card reader with a Fuji xD card inside it.

And you have a Mac running Mac OS X 10.4.9. And you attach the card reader, insert the card, and … nothing. The drive doesn’t show up on the desktop. It doesn’t show up in the sidebar.

Weird.

You check System Profiler. Good news: the Mac can see the device after all:

ImageMate xD-SM:

Capacity: 250 MB
Removable Media: Yes
Detachable Drive: Yes
BSD Name: disk1
Version: 91.39
Bus Power (mA): 500
Speed: Up to 480 Mb/sec
Manufacturer: SanDisk
OS9 Drivers: No
Product ID: 0x9595
Serial Number: 0100536881
S.M.A.R.T. status: Not Supported
Vendor ID: 0x0781
Volumes:
NO NAME:
Capacity: 249.98 MB
Available: 65.66 MB
Writable: Yes
File System: MS-DOS FAT16
BSD Name: disk1s1
Mount Point: /Volumes/NO NAME

Not only can the Mac see the drive, but it’s mounted. Sure enough, if you go to the Finder, choose Go > Go to Folder, type “/Volumes” and click Go, there it is.

So what gives? If you look around SanDisk’s mess of a web site[1] and register, and search the “Self-Help”[2][3][4] section, you find the article “My USB reader/USB Flash Drive won’t mount on Mac OS 10.3.3?“[5]. However, SanDisk’s article just point’s to Apple’s article “Mac OS X 10.3.3: USB device, FireWire device, RAID card or SCSI card doesn’t work after updating to 10.3.3,” which tells you to upgrade to 10.3.4 or better.

But we’re already using 10.4.9. That doesn’t help.

Here was the workaround I came up with:

  • Launch Disk Utility
  • Erase the xD card

Poof! Eject the card, stick it back in the camera, take a photo, stick it back in the reader and it shows up. Weird.

  1. The link I used won’t even take you directly to the product page.
  2. Or “Self Help,” depending on which team wrote the copy.
  3. a.k.a. knowledge base
  4. This site has been outsourced to CustomerNation.
  5. I can’t even paste the full 776-character URL here, because WordPress is having trouble with it.