I was attempting to drag the Mac HD icon from the finder to the desktop in order to copy it (what I thought) and it seems to of deleted it which I don't know how. I look in trash and in finder but to no avail. PLEASE HELP
The icon in the sidebar is an alias, just like the Dock, and all you have done is deleted the alias.
Go to the Finder menu, select Preferences, and then in the toolbar of the pane which opens click 'Sidebar'. In the 'Devices' section check 'Hard Disks'. (If necessary uncheck it and recheck it.)
If you want to show your Hard Disk on the Desktop, go to the 'General' pane of Finder Preferences and check 'Hard Disks'.
The icon in the sidebar is an alias, just like the Dock, and all you have done is deleted the alias.
Go to the Finder menu, select Preferences, and then in the toolbar of the pane which opens click 'Sidebar'. In the 'Devices' section check 'Hard Disks'. (If necessary uncheck it and recheck it.)
If you want to show your Hard Disk on the Desktop, go to the 'General' pane of Finder Preferences and check 'Hard Disks'.
First, can you explain what you mean by "copy it". Were you trying to copy files from one place to another, or something else?
Open a Finder window, go to the Finder menu, click Preferences, then General. Make sure "Show these items on the desktop" - "Hard drives" is ticked. Click the Sidebar icon at the top of the Preferences window, and under Devices, make sure your "Macintosh HD" is ticked. Now hopefully you should see the HD in the Finder's sidebar and your desktop.
No problem! Feel free to post back if you have any more questions.
You do have to watch out for the difference between icons you can move around (eg, moving a folder from one place to another), and icons which are just shortcuts and can't be copied. The icons in the Finder's sidebar are just shortcuts, and dragging them out of the sidebar will effectively remove them from the sidebar - they won't get copied to the place you drag them. Locations (files or folders) in the right side of the Finder can, however, be copied, for example to the sidebar, or to the right side of the Dock to create shortcuts there.