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Macintosh HD icon is not on my Desktop or visible from the Finder

After upgrading to Leopard, the "*Macintosh HD*" icon does not show up on the Desktop or in the Finder. Not even in the Finder under my Machine's name.

The drive exists - since I'm typing this from a workable install of Leopard. But it doesn't show up in the Finder.

Using GetFileInfo (from the Developer Tools folder) I can see that the Visibility flag is set. If I turn that flag off, the drive reappears until I bring up a Finder window and select the drive. Then it is gone and something has reset the "V" extended attribute flag.

Anyone else experiencing this fun?

MacBook Pro C2D, Mac OS X (10.5)

Posted on Nov 2, 2007 4:47 PM

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81 replies

Jun 12, 2018 5:44 PM in response to Paul Laskin

Aha, I've been having this problem ever since I upgraded to Leopard too. Good to finally find out what is causing it, if not a solution. I do have two tips for others with this problem though:
1. Leopard allows access to the visibility bit with chflags - no need to install dev tools.
sudo chflags nohidden /
2. Removing write access to / prevents the flag from being set again. You'll have to authenticate every time you want to write to / but for me that's practically never, so I'm happy to live with it for the moment.

Jun 12, 2018 5:44 PM in response to Paul Laskin

Wait a second, could the partitioning be causing it? I also have a second partition for Boot Camp (running XP, thank goodness). I guess there would be plenty of other people with the problem if that was the case but still, it might have something to do with it...

Jun 12, 2018 5:44 PM in response to PhotographicMemories

And as I mentioned before, a better solution (IMO) is to remove write access to the root of your drive immediately after you remove the flag.

sudo chflags nohidden /
sudo chmod g-w /

If you're not familiar with what actually happens here then you should know that it only affects the root of your drive and that you can still write there, it'll just ask you to authenticate to do so.

Jun 12, 2018 5:44 PM in response to Kiki Splash

Yes it works, I wouldn't have said it if it didn't 😉 But I'll reiterate that it +only affects the root of your drive+. The root is the top-level directory - your "Macintosh HD". It does not affect any subfolders. I imagine most people would very rarely write to this location so it isn't really annoying at all.

As for fixing it, well it'll happen in some 10.5.x update - they certainly aren't going to release a special fix just for this problem, nor can they be expected to have caught every issue in the 10.5.1 update. If it isn't fixed in 10.5.2, then you can start complaining 😉

Nov 2, 2007 5:32 PM in response to Paul Laskin

Paul

From your description it seems unlikely that Francine's notes can help, since you've already done that. This is all a bit weird (OK, fun 🙂 )

I think we'll need to resort to Terminal to find out exactly what is happening. Make sure you are logged in as an 'admin' user, and copy and paste the following into the Terminal window followed by a return:
sudo iosnoop /

You may not get any output immediately, but if it starts generating a lot, the only way to terminate this program is with Control-C.

Now, in another Terminal window, clear the (In)visibility flag again, and see what sort of output you get from iosnoop (but don't stop it yet—if necessary make your Terminal window longer—I have mine at 48 lines with no problem). Then try to recreate your situation where the drive goes invisible and again, check the output from iosnoop.

If something looks promising, use the PID to discover which process is doing this. Post back if you need more help with this.

Nov 2, 2007 7:34 PM in response to Michael Conniff

Michael - Thanks for the iosnoop command. I haven't used that one yet. I piped it to a tmp file so I could take a more casual look at the output.
This is getting stranger. I've initially narrowed it down to either syncing with .Mac - (possibly sync of Preferences) or Spotlight being update (mdworker).

I need to test this a bit more to figure out which one, but right now Spotlight appears to trigger the disappearing Macintosh HD. I've just done a
sudo mdutil -i off /

And the drive is sticking around. Syncing with .Mac (with and without Preferences sync'd) seems to work fine.

Then I turn on Spotlight ... hmm, thought that was it. It is still there. .. Ah! after about a minute it disappears. Once it is gone, bringing it back with SetFile and then opening the drive makes it immediately disappear.

I do a mdutil -i off /
and the drive sticks around.

Strange.
I think I'll try deleting spotlight preferences to see if that helps. I wonder what it the pref file is named. com.apple.mdfind?

Nov 4, 2007 6:36 AM in response to ali brown

Ali,

Thanks for the reference to that article. But, I had already tried that. In fact I think I have "sudo ./SetFile -i v /" a hundred times over the last few days.

It has been about 16 hours since I turned off Spotlight "mdutil -ai off /", deleted all the .Spotlight-V100 files on all of my volumes (Internally I have 2 that are always mounted and externally 1 or 2 FW and 3 USB volumes that are mounted when I'm working). I also deleted ~/Library/Caches folder and threw out any preferences files that had been modified since the last time Macintosh HD disappeared.

I rebooted into the Install DVD, repaired disk permissions and verified all drives. Everything checked out fine - no problems except a permission on an Apache file. Highly doubt that was an issue.

Since turning off Spotlight and doing all the above, everthing is working fine. The Finder is working as it should albeit without Spotlight.

My next step is to turn Spotlight on, but not allow it to index any files. .. I

Hmm, I just checked the status of Spotlight with "mdutil -avs" and it does show that Spotlight is on for my Time Machine backup file. I forgot, Time Machine treats that file as a volume. That means Spotlight has been working for at least the last 12 hours.

Well, I'll add another volume to the mix. Here goes nothing.

Nov 4, 2007 9:40 AM in response to Michael Conniff

O.K. - here is the update. No fix yet but it is Spotlight that sets the 'V' attribute.
As soon as I removed 'Macintosh HD' from the Privacy list and then turned Spotlight on for that volume, the 'V' bit was flipped.

I could reset it, but as long as mds was doing something (as measured by cpu usage) the bit would toggle back. Simply adding the drive to the Privacy list didn't seem to stop the bit twiddling. Only turning off indexing on that drive helped.

I could also trigger this by forcing spotlight by mdimport -V /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD

I have filed a bug with Apple on this since I'm not quite sure where to go from here. iosnoop helped me determine it was Spotlight, but I can't tell what Spotlight is doing that would make it act this way on only this volume.

Message was edited by: Paul Laskin

Message was edited by: Paul Laskin because he made a typo

Nov 4, 2007 10:10 AM in response to Paul Laskin

Paul Laskin wrote:
O.K. - here is the update. No fix yet but it is Spotlight that sets the 'V' attribute.

Good! Knowing the cause, or part of it, goes a long way to finding a fix
I have filed a bug with Apple on this since I'm not quite sure where to go from here. iosnoop helped me determine it was Spotlight, but I can't tell what Spotlight is doing that would make it act this way on only this volume.

No, I guess this is definitely one for the developers. But hopefully your detective work will lead to a fix for all sooner rather than later!

Nov 4, 2007 11:13 AM in response to Paul Laskin

Wonderful detective work Paul! And I'm delighted that you filed a bug report. Let us hope that this contributes to a solution on the programmers' part for this vexing problem. I believe you are the first person to find a reproducible instance of the bug, all the other cases seem to have been sporatic, so let's hope your sleuthing leads to a cure.
Francine

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Francine
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Macintosh HD icon is not on my Desktop or visible from the Finder

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