[torifile]

In all my years of using OS X, I've never been able to reliably use the finder when I've got some external flash cards connected. What I mean is that, inevitably, the finder will crash or become completely unresponsive when I try to do something with the cards. That could be eject them or copy something off of them. Sometimes the entire computer becomes unresponsive until I just take the damn thing out and then it's fine except for the device removal warning.

Like just now, I just put in an SD card into my external card reader. I was just messing around with my new digicam and took a video with it. I tried to play it. No go. Quicktime was frozen. I tried to eject it. Just the spinning beach ball. I tried to relaunch the finder. Nothing. sudo kill -9 the finder. That killed the desktop but that's it. I tried to relaunch it. Nope. And quicktime won't respond to kill -9 requests either. WTF is going on? This is something that I've experienced with every computer I've ever used OS X on. Every. Single. One. It can't be me, can it? My card reader? Or is the Finder and file subsystems so screwed up that it can't really handle external flash media? Help. This is pissing me off.

[chucker]

Buggy chipset in the card reader combined with the bad locking exhibited by the Finder.

[torifile]

Ok. I just had a kernel panic and I restarted my computer. I'm still getting the spinning beach ball in the finder. No desktop. I'm going to try to repair permissions. Luckily I have the terminal in my dock otherwise I wouldn't be able to launch anything.

[chucker]

Try killing SystemUIServer.

[torifile]

Repair permissions but things were fine. I'm at a loss.

[torifile]

Originally Posted by chucker Try killing SystemUIServer.

That reset my menu items but the finder still doesn't work.

[torifile]

Doing a ps -ax | grep "Finder" gets this:

/System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/MacOS/Finder -psn_0_786433

What does that last part mean?

[torifile]

There we go. kill -HUP did it. I'll try a different card reader.

[chucker]

Originally Posted by torifile Doing a ps -ax | grep "Finder" gets this: /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/MacOS/Finder -psn_0_786433 What does that last part mean?

That's just the ID of the WindowServer session to bind to. Normal.

[Gaslight]

Hi:

Don't discount a physical inspection of the reader. Inserting card media spotted with pocket lint may have built up on the inside of the reader and may prevent one contact from connecting, resulting in strangeness.

How do I know?

Errr....never mind. Let's just say that I'm surprized by the amount of pocket lint I generate.

Apart from that, be scientfic: Does the same card reader mount other media properly? Does the card in question mount properly in another user account on the same machine? On different machines? What happens if you move the card reader onto another machine?