LabVIEW

cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Problems with Toshiba USB Drives (NI software updates) and Apple

Hello all,

we've been having a lot of troubles with NI's Toshiba USB drives (the grey USB sticks that they send you the software updates on) on our Apple devices. For the last three or so years, they would not work on any of our Apple devices (Macbook Pro, Mac Mini, iMac...), with the symptom being that we could browse all directories on the drive, but we could only open files on the root folder. All other files in subfolders would be broken (not able to open).

 

With the 2017 update that arrived some weeks ago, this seems to have changed: It seems the drive is no longer formatted as ISO 9660, but plain NTFS. 

 

Out of curiosity, has anybody else faced these problems, and if so, how did you work around them?

 

Regards,

Joerg




DSH Pragmatic Software Development Workshops (Fab, Steve, Brian and me)
Release Automation Tools for LabVIEW (CI/CD integration with LabVIEW)
HSE Discord Server (Discuss our free and commercial tools and services)
DQMH® (The Future of Team-Based LabVIEW Development)


0 Kudos
Message 1 of 7
(3,436 Views)

Hi Joerg,

 

Which USB stick(s) are you using and having a problem with? Is it the LV 2017 for Mac Professional or Full, or are you using a different USB stick on a VM, such as a Windows VM with the LV 2017 USB for Windows?

 

I just rechecked the LV 2017 for Mac Pro USB stick on a Mac Mini and it installed without issue.

 

Also, I can confirm that the Mac Mini I am using says the format of the 2017 USB stick is NTFS. Even so, as I mentioned above, it still seems to work without issue. Is that specifically causing a problem for you or was that just another difference that you noticed from previous years?

 

Thanks,

Nathan

0 Kudos
Message 2 of 7
(3,385 Views)

Hi Nathan,

 

thanks for your support. I just re-read my original post and realised that I did not mention the fact that we do not(!) have any problems with the current LV 2017 USB stick, only with past versions. Please take my apologies for that and let me clarify:

1.) I'm talking about the greyish USB sticks on which our Software Platform Bundle package is distributed (they look just like the ones that James McNally tweeted about).

 

2.) The sticks that we got in the last years would not work when plugged physically into our Apple computers. In Mac OS X, the USB stick would show up with a CD/DVD icon, and we would not be able to browse the full contents. In our virtual machines running Windows XP, 7 and (recently) 10 inside VMWare Fusion, we would be able to browse the full hierarchy of the USB stick, but we would not be able to open files in subdirectories, only the files in the root folder would work. The format of the sticks is reported as CDFS (or ISO-9660).

 

3.) With the latest USB stick containing LV 2017 and NXG, this changed: Now, the stick works as expected in Mac OS X and in our VMs running Windows. Also, the format of the stick is NTFS (I guess that makes all of the difference).

 

My question is how to make the older (pre-2017) sticks work on our Apple computers.

 

Thanks and regards,

Joerg




DSH Pragmatic Software Development Workshops (Fab, Steve, Brian and me)
Release Automation Tools for LabVIEW (CI/CD integration with LabVIEW)
HSE Discord Server (Discuss our free and commercial tools and services)
DQMH® (The Future of Team-Based LabVIEW Development)


0 Kudos
Message 3 of 7
(3,381 Views)

Hi Joerg,

 

Thanks for the clarification and sorry about the complications with the older USB sticks. Initial conversations with the team that owns the USB Suites suggested reading the sticks with a standard Windows system and hosting the files in a different, accessible location for the Windows-on-Mac systems.

 

Can you add more details about your specific setup? A traditional Windows machine should be able to read the USBs successfully and I would have expected that the Windows VM would have the appropriate drivers/access to the USB port to also read it correctly, but perhaps there is something specific with the VM you are using that could be related to this?

 

Thanks,

Nathan

0 Kudos
Message 4 of 7
(3,372 Views)

My current workaround is to plug the sticks into a Raspberry PI and then share the contents via SMB, but that's more complex than I would like it to be.

 

I think the problem comes from Apple's USB (firmware? controller?). If the hardware doesn't work, the virtualization software can't fix that, right? The devices I recently tried it with are:

 

- MacBook Pro (Retina 15", Early 2013) running macOS Sierra 10.12.5 (16F73)

- iMac (Retina 5K 27", Early 2017) running macOS Sierra 10.12.5 (16F73)

 

The VMWare Fusion version is Professional Version 8.5.8 (5824040).




DSH Pragmatic Software Development Workshops (Fab, Steve, Brian and me)
Release Automation Tools for LabVIEW (CI/CD integration with LabVIEW)
HSE Discord Server (Discuss our free and commercial tools and services)
DQMH® (The Future of Team-Based LabVIEW Development)


0 Kudos
Message 5 of 7
(3,368 Views)

Curious.  When we got our LabVIEW bundles (2015, 2016, 2017), they all came on the grey USB Drives, and all worked on PCs.  When we requested the Mac and Linux versions, in 2015 and 2016 we received DVDs, while for 2017 we got USB Drives.

 

Bob Schor

0 Kudos
Message 6 of 7
(3,356 Views)

@Bob_Schor wrote:

Curious.  When we got our LabVIEW bundles (2015, 2016, 2017), they all came on the grey USB Drives, and all worked on PCs.  When we requested the Mac and Linux versions, in 2015 and 2016 we received DVDs, while for 2017 we got USB Drives.

Curious, indeed 🙂




DSH Pragmatic Software Development Workshops (Fab, Steve, Brian and me)
Release Automation Tools for LabVIEW (CI/CD integration with LabVIEW)
HSE Discord Server (Discuss our free and commercial tools and services)
DQMH® (The Future of Team-Based LabVIEW Development)


0 Kudos
Message 7 of 7
(3,355 Views)