Hidden Hard Drive

Question

Level 1

16 points

Hidden Hard Drive

Hi all!
I consider myself a fairly advanced computer user, so this one has me baffled, as well as apple support and my local genius bar. So i hope there is someone out there who has at least seen this before.

One morning I woke up and my Time Machine volume wasn't on my desktop, or in the finder sidebar. But if I went into Disk Utility, everything looked as it should. (Note: a friend of mine had this happen a week after upgrading to leopard...but this happened to his boot volume) If I go into terminal and navigate to the folder "/Volumes" (without the quotes), the drive is listed as there, and mounted. If I do "ls -lO", there is a "hidden" flag that appears in the list of attributes.

My solution was to use the "chflags" command that was included in leopard. The command is "chflags nohidden /path/to/dir". After that, you have to "killall Finder" and the drive appears in my sidebar, and on my desktop as it should.

After about an hour or so, I went into terminal to check on the properties of the volume, and it was back to hidden. If I restart the machine, or Finder, the volume disappears again.

This doesn't happen all the time. In fact, I can't find a pattern to it at all. There's nothing about it in console or anywhere else in the system, and I can't find any solutions online. This is a very annoying problem knowing that it could happen to any of my disks, at any time, and knowing that there's nothing I can do about it.

Screenshots:

MacBook Pro 15", 2.16 Core Duo, 2GB, Mac OS X (10.5.1)

Posted on Jan 3, 2008 10:59 PM

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Answer 1

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

Well it seems 10.5.2 hasn't fixed the issue but much thanks to Francine for finding a proper fix for it. Oddly enough, I never added a comment to the drive myself. The comment mysteriously appeared on the drive one day (back when I was using Tiger) - some odd letters and numbers like some sort of serial number or something. I had no idea what it was or how it got there.

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Answer 2

cdavenport Author

Level 1

16 points

Jan 3, 2008 11:12 PM in response to cdavenport

Just an update...

There is a technical document that references this http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=305402 . This did nothing. It didn't even change the "hidden" flag that appears in the second screenshot above.

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Answer 3

Peggy Lynn

Level 4

2,484 points

Jan 3, 2008 11:39 PM in response to cdavenport

It's an issue that has been around for awhile and for some users there is no permanent solution. There is information about it about three quarters down the page here:
http://pinkmutant.com/articles/invisible.html

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Answer 4

cdavenport Author

Level 1

16 points

Jan 3, 2008 11:44 PM in response to Peggy Lynn

yes, the things that I have tried are the same things that website mentions...I however forgot to say that I got the ideas from that website...those provide only a temporary fix. The drive still re-hides itself at random.

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Answer 5

Jan 4, 2008 11:52 AM in response to cdavenport

The original problem appeared in Tiger, it was sporatic and only affected a few people here and there. In Leopard the problem seems to be more common, and for some people it is not fixed by any of the procedures for resetting the visible bit--or rather, the visible bit does get reset, but whatever is causing the problem promptly resets it back to invisible. There is as yet no solution, or even theory about what is causing it. Paul Laskin's thread, referenced at the beginning of the Leopard section in my article, is concerned with a variation of the problem which seems to involve Spotlight. Since Spotlight doesn't index the Time Machine drive, this would not seem to apply to your case. The only suggestion I have is to make an alias to the chronically disappearing drive and use the alias for access.
Francine

Francine
Schwieder

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Answer 6

cdavenport Author

Level 1

16 points

Jan 4, 2008 10:47 PM in response to Francine Schwieder

I didn't realize you wrote that article. That is what helped me find my way through the first few steps of this issue. I did some testing today however to see if i could figure anything out, and I think you are right. Spotlight is involved in this somehow. If i add my drive to the spotlight privacy list, this issue never occurred. I went through 10 startup cycles with it on the private list, and it never once went invisible. As soon as i removed it form the private list and rebooted, it flipped to invisible. I am not sure what Spotlight is doing to the time machine drive however. It doesn't seem to index the whole thing because that takes a good 15 minutes or more. Immediately after I had removed the drive from the spotlight privacy list and rebooted, there was a good 2 or 3 minutes of heavy activity on the drive (which was not a TM backup, i have those disabled right now). So spotlight is doing something, I'm just not sure what. Also, what disadvantages are there to disabling spotlight on my TM drive, will i be able to search my backup sets in the star-field view still?

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Answer 7

Jan 5, 2008 10:29 AM in response to cdavenport

I did a little investigation on Spotlight and the Time Machine drive. I had noticed that when I do a Spotlight search on an item that exists only on my startup drive and on the Time Machine drive, the only result is for the version on my startup drive. If I make Time Machine active I can do a search within the Time Machine Finder window and it goes to the results on the Time Machine drive.

I also found a number of people who reported that they could not get an initial Time Machine backup unless they first disabled Spotlight searching on their Time Machine drive, by adding it to Privacy. I also found this at MacOSXHints:

http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?p=428550

The first poster is getting quite different behavior than I do. Others seem to experience no issues leaving the drive in the Privacy pane.

So I'm feeling a bit confused about the relationships between Time Machine and Spotlight. I would guess that you can't do a search within Time Machine if it is in the Privacy pane.
Francine

Francine
Schwieder

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Answer 8

Jan 5, 2008 11:40 AM in response to Francine Schwieder

It would make sense that if the problem originated in Tiger, then it is probably linked to a new feature like spotlight. The info on the Pink Mutant Web seems to provide a way of dealing with this issue. I am very concerned that this issue will resurface after spending several days reinstalling panther and leopard.
Since I'm new to leopard, how do I turn privacy on in spotlight to prevent my boot drive from going invisible?
Isn't there a way to prevent changing the visibility bit by locking the preferences of the invisible drive?
My solution was to reinstall everything. Now I'm worried that anything I do in leopard will cause the issue to occur over and over again. Does anyone know if making an alias will prevent the problem from ocurring to the alias?
Apple support was not of any help dealing with my issue and suggested that my hd was faulty even though I was able to boot and run from it. It appears that if they don't know, they'll make something up.
This next question may seem like a departure from the topic but it isn't.
If I eject my internal HD (panther-HD) while running Leopard so I can install zinio reader on leopard without it going screwy and locking up and destroying my license on Panther HD... is this going to cause more disappearing drive issues or problems accessing the internal HD? ( I run a few apps from my panther drive while running leopard so that I don't have to keep two copies of data files.)

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Answer 9

cdavenport Author

Level 1

16 points

Jan 5, 2008 2:10 PM in response to cdavenport

I am now 100% certain that Spotlight is the cluprit. I can predictably add the drive to the private list, make the drive visible and kill finder in terminal, then remove the drive from the private list, and seconds later it will be back to hidden. I have removed the Spotlight preference plists, caches, all of the .Spolightv-100 folders on every drive and it still does it. I have used onyx to reset the spotlight index, remove all system, application, boot and kernel caches, and it still does it. Does anyone know of a way to tell spotlight to behave?

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Answer 10

imac007

Level 3

845 points

Jan 5, 2008 2:19 PM in response to cdavenport

Have you been restarting the computer after removing the various Spotlight plists and reference files?

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Answer 11

cdavenport Author

Level 1

16 points

Jan 5, 2008 2:24 PM in response to imac007

Well...I did it all at one time, then i restarted hoping that it would be like a fresh start.

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Answer 12

imac007

Level 3

845 points

Jan 5, 2008 7:55 PM in response to cdavenport

Did you test in another user to see if the issue was system wide or just in your user account?

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Answer 13

cdavenport Author

Level 1

16 points

Jan 5, 2008 8:31 PM in response to imac007

Yes, I tested it in other user accounts.

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Answer 14

imac007

Level 3

845 points

Jan 5, 2008 8:36 PM in response to cdavenport

You have a system wide issue so your best resolution is likely to do an archive and install preserving user and network settings.
The other option is to erase the drive and Restore from the Time Machine backup.
The option is located in the Utilities menu on the install disk.

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Answer 15

cdavenport Author

Level 1

16 points

Jan 5, 2008 8:46 PM in response to imac007

All I need to do is format the actual Time Machine drive actually. The problem is that I would lose 2 almost 2 months of backups, and those are important for versioning my xcode projects. I am going to try to create an image of the drive and format that partition once I get my terabyte drive replaced and I have the space to make that kind of move. The biggest issue here is the knowledge that this could happen at any time, to any drive. That concerns me more than the knowledge of how to fix it temporarily.

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