Category Archives: MemSticks

Mounting MemSticks in OSX

Mounting/Unmounting our Sony Memory Sticks in OSX is becoming increasingly tricky.

In linux (or even in cygwin for Windows), this is a very easy process.

Mac OSX has a seemingly easy mount command-line program called ‘disktool’. It identifies the mount internally (e.g. disk1s1 or disk3), and externally (memory sticks typically come up as ‘Untitled’) and users can access this mount at /Volumes/Untitled/. disktool has commands to unmount drives via shell-scripting, which is very nice.

Annoyingly, OSX identifies sticks differently per machine and even sometimes within the machine (sometimes it’s ‘disk1s1’ or ‘disk3s1’). If you’re not careful about setting it properly in the scripts, you can unmount something you don’t want to. I found this out the hard way when I accidently unmounted Chown-dog’s hard drive.

So all of a sudden today, the external and internal identification of my stick somehow changed as I was fiddling with Makefiles. First the external id became ‘Untitled 1’ then ‘Untitled 2’ and ultimately after some ejections and a reboot, ‘UNTITLED’ (shell-scripting in OSX is case-sensitive). This changes the place where we copy all of our sweet code.

I need to use my brain and figure out a way to solve these two annoying mounting issues–both to safely unmount the correct drive, and to not have to constantly change configuration files whenever osx decides to rename a mount.