USB Drives not mounting

[Dologan]

Hi,

This is my first post, so I would like to thank everyone in this great community who have spent their time helping people to get acquainted with the very cool OS that is Mac OS X and solving their problems. Thanks to your contributions here, I have been able to wade through the installations of Leopard on my desktop ( Kalyway!) and Tiger on my aging eMachines M6805 laptop (AMD Athlon 64 SSE2) ( JaS!).

However, whereas my Leopard is working smoothly, my Tiger is still afflicted with one rather crippling problem in an otherwise perfectly running system that no amount of searching has helped me solve it so far. As it's obvious from the title, this is the inability to mount any USB drives (at least those that have FAT32/NTFS filesystems, haven't tried with HFS).

It is clearly not due to the USB port itself, as other USB peripherials (mouse,bluetooth) work and, more importantly perhaps, the disk device at /dev/disk* shows when the drive is plugged in (although this wasn't always so, though). However, OS X fails to mount the device and it is also impossible to do so manually with mount. Disk Utility, too, hangs when run with a USB drive plugged in and needs to be killed.

I am under the impression that immediately after installing Tiger, USB mounting did work, but I am not 100% sure, as I might be confused from my Leopard experience. Apart from installing some standard software which shouldn't have messed stuff up, I have had to fiddle with the wireless card drivers and video card drivers to get them working. Additionally, I messed with the PCMCIA (couldn't get it to work and restored the original kexts from the DVD with Pacifist) and installed the ACPICPUThrottle / DCPUManager for AMD. I am aware that this last one is a common source of mounting problems (although I cannot say if mine started with it too), as it seems to update the Darwin kernel to version 8.9.1 (from 8.8.1) by itself, which disables any disk mounting at all (including images, as I could attest). There is a tutorial elsewhere on the site (which I can't seem to find again for now) that describes the problem and how to fix it: make sure that the System.kext and kernel versions match. In my case, reverting to 8.8.1 + 10.4.8 System.kext (as recommended for 10.4.8) fixed the image mounting problem, but broke my system as long as ACPICPUThrottle was installed. On the other hand, using the 8.9.1 kernel in combination with the 10.4.9 System.kext fixed my DMG mounting problem, but still allowed the CPU Throttle to work without causing panics, so that's what I am using at the moment (making my system something of a 10.4.8.5 version, I guess). However, neither option seemed to fix the USB drive mounting problem and uninstalling ACPICPUThrottle altogether did not help either. Since I have some reasonable confidence that just after the installation the USB drive mounting was working properly, I am pretty sure that it should be something fixable by restoring some kexts or something, but I have no idea where to start.

I am hoping that somebody with a better idea of how OS X works might provide some insight into what could be wrong. Any assistance is very much appreciated.