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kIOReturnNoMedia
Device presence is not media presence
kIOReturnNoMedia is commonly associated with removable storage. The device or reader can be visible to IOKit while no card, disc, tape, or other medium is present. This differs from kIOReturnNoDevice, where the device itself is unavailable, and from kIOReturnUnformattedMedia, where media exists but lacks a usable format for the requested operation.
Applications should not cache a prior volume or media identity across this result. A user can remove one medium and insert another in the same reader, so a later success may refer to a different object with different capacity, partitioning, or security properties.
How to respond
- Observe media-inserted and media-removed notifications instead of polling the device aggressively.
- Query the current disk or IOMedia properties after insertion; do not reuse a previous BSD name or mount point blindly.
- Tell users whether the physical device is detected separately from whether media is present.
- Cancel operations that require the previous medium and revalidate application-level identity when a new one appears.
References
- Apple IOReturn.h reference
- Apple Disk Arbitration Programming Guide
- Apple IOKit Fundamentals: Architectural Overview
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