Having decided that larger, and cheaper (...) flash drives could solve some portability problems (mostly, my aching back and a wallet that did not allow for a new Portégé), I started looking around at what was available. I fixed on a 4gb SanDisk U3 model and two 2gb Kingston U3 models (good price at buy.com; free shipping; no sales taxes; substantial rebates available; acceptable return policy). I am encountering a strange phenom with the Kingston drives (the SanDisk not having arrived yet).
If I connect the Kingston U3 drives to my XP notebook or Mrs. Jenner's deskside XP machine, things work as expected. The drive installs; it ejects and things go swimmingly. If I connect the same drives to my deskside XP machine, a number of things happen:
1) Neither drive will eject properly. That is, I can click the eject button in the launchpad, but the drive does not eject. The drive light goes from slow-flashing, to rapid-flashing, then steady, then back to slow-flashing. A message appears indicating an error, and that there are possibly open files or apps (neither true, so far as I can tell from the Task Manager processes list). In fact, the drive does seem to have been properly closed; I can remove the unit, then reconnect it, and the launch is normal (no you-failed-to-eject-properly message as the drive reconnects).
2) One drive (but not both) also causes a strange effect. When it is plugged in, and the mouse pointer is visible, the hour-glass flickers on and off, (flc/flc/flc/pause, (flc/flc/flc/pause, (flc/flc/flc/pause,...).
Kingston's basic tech support had not seen this, and could not find a tech note on it. Naturally, the higher-echelon support folks weren't around (they don't do weekends...), precluding escalation before Monday.
Any brilliant insights?
[This is a problem, but not a great one; I got a good enough price, I am not worried about the U3 feature, if it never works quite perfectly. Moreover, the only time that drive will be connected to the deskside machine is when I am putting datafiles on. On the other hand, if this can happen here, it can show up elsewhere. Also, I hate it when I buy tech that looks neat and someone hasn't really tested it to destruction.]
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SanDisk, but not Kingston tech support had an answer. I listed the stuff in my "tray" and as soon as I said InCD, I got a "that's it". Killed InCD and the problem went away. I should have figured this out myself; my system was seeing the U3 partition as a writable CD and InCD was therefore looking at it suspiciously.
Makes sense that it would be the problem. Thank you for the update!
~Lurk~
~Lurk~
Yeah, there's an annoying error in the table of contents in the U3 CD partition that conflicts with InCD (and, I would imagine, other CDRW programs that do active polling of CD media). The only solution is to not use InCD. It cost me 1/2 a day of development time figuring that one out.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!