Catalina &The operation can't be completed because the original item for "boo" can't be found

The fastest way for me:

1. Hold the Option key and right-click the Finder icon in the Dock, then select Relaunch.
2. Press Option-Command-Escape or choose Force Quit from the Apple menu, then select the Finder and click Relaunch.

I tried a bunch of things and nothing worked, until I just reset all permissions the Linux way.

***DO NOT DO THIS ON YOUR OS DRIVE!***

For use on external or secondary drives only. Use with caution. This will reset any permissions the operating system has set and could render your entire macOS installation or other applications useless.

• 10.15.1 was already installed, didn't help
• Starting and stopping file sharing, didn't help
• Multiple reboots, didn't help
• Turning on AFP and SMB, didn't help
• Adding a sharing only user, didn't help
• My drive was already formatted to Mac OS Extended Journaled

What finally fixed it is going to the command line (Terminal app) and using chown to reset all permissions.

First list all mounted drives

ls /volumes

Then run this command, putting in your username and external drive label. Terminal will prompt you to enter your password.

sudo chown -R yourusername:staff /volumes/yourexternaldrive/*

I have also same issue. After update My computer to Catalina now I cant access WD My cloud Server.. This issue too much annoying to me. always I restart my computer because of this case. please prepare the new update for fix this bug asap

I had the same issue until I went in to system preferences/sharing......... I turned all the sharing off then I turned them back on and it cleared up most of the issues. I still had an issue with an external drive sharing permission's as they were grayed out and it seems to be how the drive is formatted. i had it formatted to exfat. So I decided to run a test and formatted the drive to mac ext journaled and it cleared that permissions issue up but it came right back once I reformatted to exfat.

hope that helps others.

I had the same problem after updating a 2014 MBP, a 2016 iMac and a 2016 Mac Mini (used as file server). The same message kept bouncing for any access to all drives connected to the Mini.

Although ownership was 777 on all volumes, it still didn't work. Using the Finder, I added the username connecting to the Mini remotely as owner of the volumes (now: user, system, admin, everyone) and changed it to 775.

It worked after I relaunched the Finder on the clients.

Hi Martin,

It refers to the Unix command chown. 777 gives all rights to owner, group and everyone. 775, the same but everyone, who has no write access. 755 read, write only for the owner. Man chown explains this better.

In Finder, you can do the same with these three levels per default. I could only recover access by adding one level above “owner” with the registered user I am using to access the volumes remotely. You need to relaunch the Finder to recover access.

It has probably something to do with ownership, but I didn’t look into this more. Was happy it worked.

Good luck.

Alain

Awesome! This solved the issue for me. It's like I had a cached copy of the connection from my iMac to MBP, and after disconnecting and reconnecting the MBP to the network, it was still trying to find the old connection. Restarting Finder fixed it.

Thank you!!!

And an issue that probably oughta be fixed in a way other than having folks here tell you to relaunch the finder every time you need to connect to a network share. It seems all-too-often that that becomes the acceptable solution.

I have a server (mac mini with macOS 10.13.6) serving some shares via smb and advertising them via Bonjour. The Finder displays the server's symbol in the sidebar. The server goes to sleep if it's idle. I have a airport express in my network, which acts as sleep proxy and wakes up the server on network access. When my client MacBook Pro with Catalina (currently 10.15.4) I can reproduce the/my problem as follows starting with a fresh login:

1) Finder is able to connect with the server and lists the available shares. If the server is asleep it is woken up - I see "Connecting....". I open a share, browse it, and finally unmount/disconnect it. So far so good.

2) I wait several minutes until the server goes to sleep. It does that if once all smb connections are closed. I can confirm this on the server with "pmset -g assertions"

3) On the Catalina client I go back to the Finder Window where I last browsed (or simply looked at) the server's shares. I choose one and get the famous "The operation can't be completed.... original item can't be found". There seems to be no network traffic at all - the server stays asleep. Opening another Finder window does not help. Even if the server is woken somehow the Finder is of no use to access that Bonjour server. Opening the share via Cmd-K seems more reliable and does mount a share. Killing the Finder does help. The Finder will then succeed and we're back at step 1.

On Mojave step 3 does happen as well BUT a new Finder Window seems to open a new connection with the server and finally succeeds... I can live with that! Whatever Catalina tries to do some here (clever caching or whatever) ... for me my bonjour server has become rather useless and very frustrating. I liked macOS because of it's capability to save energy by sleeping and waking up on demand. With Catalina this has become problematic.

I have to add that because of those problems I tried other things like using automounts via /etc/auto_master and an OpenDirectory server and while those shares did not suffer from that particular "The operation can't complete" problem, the Finder also seems to have problems reconnecting. To my surprise It displays the shares and its contained folders of /Network/Servers/server.example.com/MyShare with document-Icons and becomes unreliable and useless as well. What I've also noticed is that Catalina fails to mount/authenticate the network home folders of network users that are managed in an OpenDirectoy... Again Mojave also does a much better job for me in this respect. I hope Apple manages to fix those problems.

KostasAnagnostakis wrote:

I found somewhere else the solution to the same issue that was torturing me for so many months:

From your preferences, try to find the IPV6 and change it from Automatic to "Link-local only"

Do you have to change both server and client, or just server or just client?

Updating to 10.15.1 did not fix the issue for me.