Desktop drive icon missing for just one of several USB external drives

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14 points

Desktop drive icon missing for just one of several USB external drives

I have a Mac Mini running OS 10.8.2 Server. There are 12 Seagate Flex USB drives (attached through two USB 2.0 powered hubs) and 3 Western Digital Firewire drives, and until last week all functioned absolutely normally. Last week the desktop icon for one (just one!) of the Firewire drives dissappeared, but the drive is still mounted in /Volumes. It is even correctly shared and can be remotelly accessed on another Mini and a MacBook. Disk Utility shows that it is mounted, and the Repair Disk function unmounts, checks, reports all is well and remounts. I'm just missing the icon in Finder. Where is it?

Before you suggest it.... Yes, hard disks is checked under Finder Devices preferences. All the other drives do show as expected in both the root folder view and on the Finder sidebar. This one drive is mounted and visible in ls -ls /Volumes, but missing from desktop, root folder and sidebar in Finder.

Mac mini Server (Mid 2011), OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2)

Posted on Nov 21, 2012 1:42 PM

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Answer 1

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doug_blair Author

Level 1

14 points

Dec 9, 2012 10:20 AM in response to doug_blair

Just a little follow-up.

I was able to fix this problem, but I am still at a loss to explain how it happened.

The fix was to use rsync to copy all of the files stored on the drive to temporary storage (another new 3TB drive), reformat the old one, give it a new name (which arrived with a new icon) and then rename the drive back to its old name. I then used rsync to move all the files back, so I am back where I started.

D.

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Answer 2

Feb 27, 2014 3:45 PM in response to doug_blair

I am having the exact issue with both 10.8.5 and 10.9.1 servers.

The server is doing well and then one day without notice or failure the desktop icon for the shared volume is gone. The share remains mounted and available to users. The volume is not showing damaged or any other problem. The volume can be found in terminal and by doing a finder go to the /Volumes area and all is there. But, even though disk utility shows it mounted and all else is good, Server app then starts to loose the volume for maintenance and propogation etc, it still shares but can't be seen or touched by GUI's.

I also was easily able to get back all through Backups that were up to date so no data loss, but this is quite disconcerting.

One possible variable is that both that I have seen are software RAIDs (Disk Utility raids).

If anyone has any thoughts I appreciate it.

The two servers are Mac Pro 2012 4 core 10.8.5 server and Mac Pro 2008 early 4 core 10.9.1 server.

Thanks MDB

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Answer 3

doug_blair Author

Level 1

14 points

Mar 16, 2014 7:17 AM in response to doug_blair

And here is still more follow-up, 14 mnths later and it happened again. I still do not know what caused it, but there is a much easier way to fix it.

What happened (at least in my case) is that the drive's visibility attribute has been swtched off. One can turn it back on using the SetFile utility.

In the Terminal app you can run SetFile (or maybe sudo SetFile), followed by -a, followed by a lowercase v, followed by the full path to the drive in question.

SetFile -a v /Volumes/DriveName

man SetFile will show you the other SetFile commands and attributes that you can change.

Doug

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Answer 4

Mar 25, 2014 8:14 AM in response to doug_blair

Doug,

I want to thank you for this follow up. I was looking everywhere for the ability to set attributes and didn't get to SetFile.

You just saved me a bunch of time and headaches.

Thanks much,

MDB

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Answer 5

dharges

Level 1

4 points

Apr 16, 2014 9:09 AM in response to Mitchell Bolander

Doug,

This same problem happened to me with an external 4TB LaCie drive, and I spent several hours yesterday trying to troubleshoot. I thought the disk had become corrupt. Then today just before I was about to erase and reformat (luckily I had a backup), I searched for "invisible hard drive" and found this thread.

Problem solved with your suggestion:

SetFile -a v /Volumes/DriveName

Thanks much for your follow up!!

David

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Answer 6

Aug 12, 2014 3:51 PM in response to dharges

What If I get "command not found" when I try to type it in? Every time I try it says that command doesn't exist? Any thoughts?

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Answer 7

doug_blair Author

Level 1

14 points

Aug 13, 2014 10:26 AM in response to mjohnson1983

mjohnson1983 & others,

You can install the SetFile command (and lots more) if you download and install XCode from the Mac app store. If you don't want all of the compilers and other bits that are included with XCode you can sign into the Apple Developer website and search for Command Line Tools to get the download of a smaller number of commands that are appropriate for your version of MacOS.

Doug

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