Dec 14, '07 07:30:00AM • Contributed by: briank
Further experimentation led me to a defective CF card. Apparently, when diskarbitrationd attempts to mount the volume, it launches fsck_msdos. And fsck_msdos appears to be brain-dead: if it cannot access the volume, it just sits there and consumes CPU cycles...all of them, as long as the machine is on, whether or not you remove the defective card.
The solution is to simply kill fsck_msdos in the Activity Monitor, and read the defective card through the camera's USB interface. Surprisingly, a search of the Apple forums in the 10.3 discussion threads produced exactly one hit, which had nothing to do with the problem.
