Boot drive doesn't appear in /Volumes

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Boot drive doesn't appear in /Volumes

Quirky issue with my mid-2014 Mac Mini running 10.14.6 Mojave, in which the boot drive (Mackintosh HD) no longer appears in /Volumes. Drive appears in Finder and Disk Utility.

Similarly, my User "Julian" no longer appears in Users.

Auto-Login still works so I can control the computer, everything generally functions as normal, except for applications that require access to file paths via /Volumes. Most likely caused as a result of a recent power failure (the issue began afterward).

Backed up to a Time Machine, I may try to install a new boot drive and restore the image, but I'd rather fix the issue manually if possible.

I checked permissions and everything seems normal:

drwxr-xr-x@ 46 Julian staff 1472 Oct 11 19:45 Julian
drwxrwxrwt@ 24 root  wheel  768 Feb 3 2023 Shared
drwxr-xr-x+ 15 admin  staff  480 Mar 27 2022 admin

Mac mini, macOS 10.14

Posted on Nov 12, 2023 12:22 AM

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Answer 1

Nov 15, 2023 2:18 PM in response to julianlevans

If you mean the boot drive you are currently running, then it won't appear in "/Volumes" since that is for drives/volumes from other sources. If you have other partitions on the boot drive besides the "Macintosh HD", then they should appear in "/Volumes", but "Macintosh HD" will not. The boot drive for macOS will always be mounted at root "/".

The only times I've seen a user not appear in "/Users" is when the user is hidden, or when people move the home folder to another location.

Actually the other time you may not see any users in "/Users" is when you are looking at a macOS 10.15+ boot drive where macOS consists of two APFS volumes. The read-only system volume will have an empty "Users" folder, only the "Users" folder on the "Data" volume will actually contain the user accounts & data.

I see a "Julian" folder at the end of your initial post which I'm assuming is showing the contents of the (or maybe a) "/Users" folder? It is odd to see an uppercase letter in a home folder name though since macOS defaults to making them all lowercase.

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