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Volume becoming partially then fully hidden somehow

I have a Drobo hard drive raid array. Twice now something has caused it to become hidden in stages:


First, it shows up grayed out and inaccessible in the left columbn of a finder window while I can still access it by double clicking on its icon on the desktop. When this happened sweveral weeks ago, it was fully visible as a desktop icon; this time the icon is grayed out on the desktop but can still be double clicked to access it.


Next, it becomes comletely hidden.


The last time this happened, after about a week it became fully hidden. Both Apple and Drobo support agonized about this and I finally repaired it by resetting the chflag from terminal to nohidden.


The same thing fixed it this time around. (it jsut went to the grayed out stage overnight)


Nevertheless, I want to figure out why this is happening.


Drobo thinks it has to be the operating system since, as far as they are concerned the drive array doesn't even have the capability to do this. I don't know if I believe them.


Apple is just mystified.


A particular mystery is the gradual nature of this, first becoming gray and unabailble from a finder window but still available from the desktop icon and then becoming totally hidden (still shows up in terminal, of course).


Is there a partially hidden (grayed out) unix flag? I can't find one.


Is there some flag that tells the finder to gray something but not fully hide it? This does happen in certain finder states with files and apps.


Would love some help figuring this out.


This happened under both Mountain Lion and Mavericks.


The drive is connected using Thunderbolt.


I am using a fairly new imac computer.


--Kenoli

iMac, OS X Mavericks (10.9.1), 24 GB RAM

Posted on Jan 16, 2014 9:49 AM

Reply
74 replies

Oct 2, 2014 11:02 AM in response to stevenfrompowell

Anyone on this forum familiar with writing shell scripts? I wish I was. Here would be a potential fix idea for a Terminal shell script, written in plain English in steps.


1. Go to /Volumes/

2. Run a "ls -lO" (ell ess dash el OH) in Terminal

3. If any volumes show as "hidden"

Then

4. chflags nohidden <volume discovered to be hidden in step 3>

5. Repeat every minute or other similar timeframe



Anyone able to write a script that'd do this? You could leave it running in the background, or even assign it to run at startup perhaps?

Oct 2, 2014 11:06 AM in response to Andy Ringsmuth

Not a bad idea, but part of the problem (for me at least) is when the bug occurs, it disconnects the drive from the client machines. Setting it back to visible on the server does not remount the drive on the client machines. We usually have to reboot the client machine becuase some oddly name mounted volume is now mounted. It won't eject. And we usually can't remount the original drive from the server, until reboot.

Oct 21, 2014 2:26 PM in response to Shorthorn

Posting this, just incase it is helpful to anyone, but I noticed two things that might help identify the issue:


1 - We turned off "AFP" and had filesharing as "SMB" only on the volume we use for file sharing. (Side note: We attached a second volume for Time Machine Backups, and it continued to run AFP.) The SMB file sharing drive didn't disappear anymore. I didn't realized why (and since it was so intermittent, I didn't know if it was really fixed). For over a month, it didn't turn to "hidden" once. Then, last week after reading another forum that recommended AFP over SMB, we chose to switch the filesharing back to AFP. That same day after switching FileSharing back to AFP and turning off SMB, the drive went "hidden" twice in the same day. So it seems to be an AFP issue for sure. As mentioned before in this post - you may want to only use AFP for TimeMachine and then use SMB for all other file sharing (although, be warned that SMB seems to have its own issues).


2 - I've noticed a few times that the drive becomes "hidden" shortly after I use ARD (Apple Remote Desktop). This could totally be coincidental, but it happened enough times that makes me wonder if ARD is part of the ingredient that is causing the drive to become hidden??

Oct 29, 2014 7:04 PM in response to MT Buck

Add me to the list.


We have a Drobo but it wasn't the one turning to 'hidden', it was two WD external drives, both doing the same thing. And yes we're using ARD as well to a mac mini server. And yes we're also using "AFP" to connect our users.


Word of warning, we kept ignoring it and just 'remounting' the drive through Terminal like so many people suggest, for about 4 months. More recently lots of our files have become hidden and wont show anymore unless we do a data recovery and we couldn't recover all of them.

Nov 5, 2014 4:13 AM in response to jessejamesb

We are also having this issue. We are 100+ staff, and have in the last 6 weeks upgraded all our file sharing kit to Mac Pros running 10.9 with OSX Server 3.2.2, connect to Lacie Rack Thunderbolt 2 RAIDS. The hidden issue started about 2 weeks ago. The issue effects missions critical solutions such as our 3rd party backup and BIM systems. With over 32Tb of data its turning into a nightmare.


Apple you obviously know what the issue is, please fix it ASAP, doing an upgrade to Yosemite is not an option as I have no confidence that a straight upgrade is survivable nor do I have any assurances that it fixes the problem......

Nov 5, 2014 6:52 AM in response to Swozza

For the first time about a week ago, I had an individual shared folder go invisible. On my 10.9.5 server, I have one large shared volume for the whole staff and a smaller share point that is simply one folder on the boot drive, containing items only shared by a few administrative people. About a week ago, that one folder became hidden as described in this thread.


Grrrr.


Come on, Apple! Like others, I sure as heck will not upgrade my primary server to Yosemite. It has more bugs than the basement in the 100-year-old house I used to own.

Nov 13, 2014 11:30 PM in response to Kenoli Oleari1

It's happening to us as well. We've got a pegasus raid being shared to a network of 30+ macs. We started with a maverick mini mac sever. Tried down grading to Mountain Lion server and the problem still persisted. The HD icon will hide itself a couple of times a day. We've also had some other issues which are no doubt related with files being mysteriously deleted off of the share point (from the bottom of the folder structure up). We narrowed that down to a couple of client machine being on 10.6.8 and sending this command at shut down:

Jul 23 17:56:50 J-server.local AppleFileServer[1216] <Info>: IP 192.168.1.114 - - "Delete Browsers" 0 0 0

Some advice is worth mentioning, make sure if you're daisy chaining thunderbolt drives that you chflags the drive in terminal before unmounting other drives in the chain. I didn't and it "virtually" swapped the contents of both discs! Few restarts later and recreation of share points fixed it but it's not very nice to see 3.5tb of data on the wrong drive in a second!

Our clients have a variety of OS, Most are on 10.8 (we upgraded to this after the issue I mentioned before). Some are on Mavericks though, my feeling is that the clients with Maverick running have something to do with the whole problem,. Has anyone had this issue who doesn't have mavericks anywhere near the problem?

Nov 20, 2014 1:06 AM in response to Kenoli Oleari1

Yosemite OS and Yosemite Server software upgrade resolved our issue of the drive hiding itself! We've had no other issues so far with the OS although we only use a very minimal amount of the software (file sharing and permissions, DNS and open directory). Also turned off SMB sharing on the share point as we're mac only so no need for it. The volume has remained unhidden for over a week now!

Dec 9, 2014 11:01 PM in response to stevejtrex600

Yes, it seems pretty stable. I've not added many services apart from the basic ones, but all seems good at the moment. I did notice the other day my server icon animate downwards on a client machine, it used to do this when I used to run the terminal command to solve the issue. So perhaps there's been some code added to Yosemite to watch for the hidden volume icon and then resolve it in the background? All in all, all seems OK at the moment.

Volume becoming partially then fully hidden somehow

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