FLASHer

[Gregg]

No, I didn't see anyone running down the street in the buff. It's far too cold for that!

It's my little flash drive again...
Copied some files to it. Selected "Eject" from the contextual menu (CTXM) and it told me no.
Actually, the message was something like Cannot eject KGURU because it is in use. Try quitting some applications and try again.

Well, I quit the applications that had been in use on the files I had copied to the Fdrive. I got the same message. So I tried to quit all open applications (I was gonna make that the topic of another thread, but maybe I'm on to something and have almost figured it out. This OSX stuff is a bit different for me!)

I still couldn't eject the Fdrive. (By this time the "F" didn't necessarily stand for "Flash".) So, I restarted. I figured this would quit out of whatever invisible app that was running, or if it was the Finder hanging on to the Fdrive, it would let go. That worked.

Anyone care to offer an explanation for this behavior? (Real one desired, but satire also tolerated.)

[Xairbusdriver]

I think I had that experience once. Not sure how I got the drive to eject, I normally use the eject button in the items sidebar listing. But, I've also accidentally pulled the 4GB drive out without ejecting it and have seen no damage from that. The problems would come, I think, if you pulled it out while it was being written to.

[Gregg]

I have had problems after pulling the drive out "too soon". I've always waited until the icon disappears from the desktop after "ejecting" the drive. Well, having done that when I was converting files on my son's iBook from AW to O4M, I found that I could not open the Excel files on the Mini. And of course, a dire warning popped up on my screen when I pulled the thing out. After that, I always made sure the LED light in the Fdrive was no longer blinking and then counted slowly to 10 before pulling it out. I have yet to experience the same file problem again.