OK, the issue of "ejecting" readers from Mac OS X pops up every now and then, so perhaps we need a sticky somewhere, but I'm not sure where. It's a Mac "problem" and occurs with various devices - there's actually nothing wrong, you just have to know how to unmount the device correctly. I'm sure I've posted this in other places on this forum, but couldn't find the link (I also posted it over on the
BeBook forum back in April 2009).
I use a little app called "Hidden Cleaner" - I found it very good but not too intuitive at first. It is in fact exceedingly simple to use, once you know how. So here are my tips based on my usage experience with Hidden Cleaner (I haven't tried other tools like BlueHarvest myself, but it also looks OK):
Installation:
(1) Download Hidden Cleaner:
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id...hidden-cleaner
http://kerosene.free.fr/ (developer's page - here you can find 2.0 beta1 & 1.2.1)
(there's a bunch of download places if you just google "mac os x hidden cleaner" - it's free!)
Note: Snow Leopard users need 2.0 beta 1, but I recommend using v1.2.1 on Leopard or below - the developer's site is in French and they advise "beacoup prudence" using 2.0 as it is in beta - I decided to play with it and it works, but I recommend using 1.2.1 until they do a formal v2.0 release.
(2) Depending where you downloaded from, either mount the disk image (HiddenCleaner_1.2.1.dmg) or unzip the file (HiddenCleaner_1.2.1.zip) and drag the "Hidden Cleaner 1.2.1" app to your Applications folder, as per usual. Eject the disk image (if using the .dmg file).
(3) If you now open the Hidden Cleaner app (double-click) you just get a nice little info message which tells you in French and English to "Simply drag your external device onto Hidden Cleaner to clean and eject it". If you click OK it close, and that's all the info you get - not too helpful.
Usage:
(4) To make the best use of Hidden Cleaner, open your Applications folder in Finder and drag the Hidden Cleaner application icon onto the Dock and release it. Once there, click and hold the mouse on the icon to reveal the context menu (or ctrl-click, or right mouse click if you have a two-button mouse). From the menu select "Keep in Dock". I place it in the first position for easy access as I use it often (far right of the dock just before the special stacks area that contains the trash can, applications stack, downloads stack, etc.).
(5) Now Hidden Cleaner will always be in the Dock, and when you need to clean and eject your USB drive, SD card, BeBook, etc., just drag the external drive's icon from the Desktop onto the Hidden Cleaner Dock item and a little pop-up will appear with the message: "Ejection?" - if you click OK the app will take a few seconds to clean and eject the drive, depending on size/type of device (BeBook takes longer because it's only USB 1.1). Once the device icon disappears from the Desktop you can safely remove it from the USB cable.
Note: Sometimes the device cleaning/ejection takes some time (20-30 secs), and the device may not eject. You will notice this because the little Hidden Cleaner "busy" mouse indicator (rotating black/white wheel) returns to the normal mouse arrow, and the active application indicator under the Hidden Cleaner Dock icon disappears, but your drive icon is still on the desktop (i.e. still mounted). I think there may be some kind of timeout in the app for the unmount/eject commands. Anyway, if this happens, just repeat the procedure by dragging the drive icon onto the Hidden Cleaner Dock icon and acknowledging the "Ejection?" query. The device should then clean and eject correctly (usually very quickly as the cleaning was completed the first time around).
eBook Devices:
(6) As for eBook devices, I usually only plug in my SD/microSD card via a card reader, so the above procedure works fine. But when I do connect my device directly (PB360, BeBook, etc.) after I'm done I use Hidden Cleaner to first clear off the hidden Mac files. The device (PB360, BeBook, etc.) will clean and eject, then remount within a few seconds. So here's what to do:
(7) Once I have cleaned the device in this way and it has remounted, I then use "Disk Utility" (Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility) to select the BeBook volume and then choose "Unmount" - remember to choose the
volume, not the device itself (in the list of devices on the left of Disk Utility you will see first the physical device, then all the logical volumes on that device - your eBook reader should only have one volume, unless you've partitoned it into more for some reason), and choose "Unmount" rather than "Eject" (if you eject the volume will just remount a few seconds later). Once unmounted, the device can be safely disconnected from your Mac.
Sounds troublesome, but it's quick and easy once you know what to do.
Note: I usually never connect my BeBook or PB360 to the Mac with an SD card inserted. In principle it should be fine, but why tempt fate? I have all my books on the SD card and manage that with a card reader, and the one time I connected my PB360 with an SD card in, when I cleaned then unmounted both volumes, the PB360 restarted and gave me an error reading the SD card. A reboot fixed the problem, but I had lost all the bookmarks and the page of the book I was reading (opened at page 1). So I would avoid it for now. The PB360 has a little bug when it comes to the SD card - if you boot the device it will not read the card at first, and as soon as you click something like "Books" the device reboots and finds the card. Never has a problem, and takes only 5-10 seconds, but clearly there's a bit of a bug in the software, so I recommend always connecting the two memory devices to your computer separately.
Alternative Method:
Apparently there's another method that I haven't tried:
If you are using OS X 10.5 or newer you don't need to install any software to clean the ._ files.
You just need to open the Terminal and type:
Code:
dot_clean /"path to folder of device"
usually when mounted the path is something like:
so you just need to open the terminal and do
Quote:
|
dot_clean /Volumes/BEBOOK
|
(The Terminal is in the Utilities Folder in the Applications folder)
I hope this lengthy post helps!
