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