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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

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74 replies

Jan 30, 2014 1:10 PM in response to Kenoli Oleari1

Kenoli,


I'll toss in a "me too" for this thread. I have a DroboElite connected via iSCSI. The host computer is a Mac Mini Server, 3 1/2 years old, running OS X 10.9.1 with OS X Server 3.0.2. This only started happening when we upgraded to Mavericks back in November.


I've narrowed it down to extended periods of higher I/O on the Drobo. It was a nightmare to get a full Time Machine backup of the Drobo after upgrading to 10.9 because it would go partially hidden as you describe. I'll get one of my co-workers calling me to say that Big Disk disappeared. I'd run back to the server, open Terminal, and type:


chflags nohidden /Volumes/Drobo - Big Disk/


(Drobo - Big Disk is the name of my device)


and suddenly the icon would go from grayed out to normal.


What's also interesting is that people who have connected to our Drobo via AFP experience the graying/ghosting as well.


It's been at least a week since it happend though, but a bit ago I had to force a Spotlight re-index of the drive. Obviously that results in higher-than-normal I/O on the Drobo. Sure enough, after about half an hour, it grayed itself.


I do not know if this was an issue in 10.8 though, because when I upgraded to 10.9, it was coming from 10.6.

Jan 31, 2014 10:45 AM in response to Andy Ringsmuth

Please add me to the "me too" on this thread. We have a Mac Mini Server, 10.8, Server 2.2.1.

Shared volume becomes gray and eventually disappears. Spent a couple hours on the phone with Apple Support and in the end, the fix they gave me was the Terminal chflags no hidden workaround. The ghosting hits us about every week. I've tried sharing an external Firewire hard drive as well as the second internal HD of the Mac Mini.

But, any "shared" volume will eventually ghost and then disappear.

I suspected Time Machine, but still got the ghosting with Time Machine off.

Mar 17, 2014 10:08 PM in response to Kenoli Oleari1

Thanks for this thread - it was helpful to me, although I didn't realize how helpful until later. Adding this comment just in case someone else stumbles accross this in my situation.


My primary issue was that Time Machine was growing at a super fast speed and was filling up. Unfortunately, to make room for the new back ups it deleted months of history. We were backing up about 400GB of data, which rapidly turned into 800GB, 1.2TB, etc. I don't know the exact sizes, but you get the idea. I couldn't figure out why Time Machine was taking up so much space. And when I would enter Time Machine, I only had a day or two of history - which was rediculous as it is a 3TB drive and previously had months of backups on it. Now it only had two days and would max out and fail??


I did notice that this Shared Volume's icon (which is on a RAID array) had lightened on the desktop (greyed out). Upon a restart of the server, the shared Volume's icon altogether disappeared. However, it didn't concern me since our users weren't affected by the "hidden" shared volume. They were all still able to connect and use the shared volume (using AFP). So my attention was on trying to fix the "Time Machine Issue." After finally taking a break on that issue - I tried to tackle this issue. Now that I've unhidden the volume and it displays again (Thanks Andy & Kenoli), it has also fixed my Time Machine Issue... who knew the two were linked??


While I don't understand it, it appears that since the drive was hidden, that Time Machine felt it needed to backup the entire Volume on each attempt, instead of doing an incremental backup.


Thanks again for the help.

Apr 24, 2014 9:07 PM in response to Kenoli Oleari1

I had a similar problem although the raid set was the internal disk rather than external disk on my Mini server 10.9.2. After a period of uptime (usually about 5 mins, but sometimes longer) the machine would just lock. It could no longer see the OS disk (main partition).


Zapping PRAM didn't fix it.


If I went in to disk utility and did a verify partition it would show no issues. But then shortly after the partition would disappear altogether from the left pane of diskutility. "Raid Slice for..." would turn red. Trying a few more times it would then seem the partition had gone offline.


I noticed that this seemed to coincide with spotlight spooling up to index. Rather than switch off spotlight I went to Library/Preferences and deleted the com.apple.splotlight.plist file. Things seem happy since then, with no lock up.


This problem had been there on and off since I updated to 10.9.2. Interestingly, the datetime on the plist file I deleted was 24 February 2014 13:37. I don't know how I can see when I upgraded to 10.9.2 but I thought it was after this date.


Either way, nuking the plist seems to be so-far-so-good. Not sure if it will solve the issue you are seeing.

Worst case perhaps you could try turning off spotlight for your external drives? Not ideal, but I have seen other references to spotlight impacting external drive performance in the past (although that would be 1+ year ago so might have been fixed).

Jun 6, 2014 11:22 AM in response to charliep4104

We are having this same problem. We are running Mavericks Server 10.9.3. We are NOT running the Drobo drives. This is on an Macintosh Pro. For drives in the bays.


A volume will start to dim on the client machines, and eventually it disappears. Going to Terminal and typing:


chflags nohidden /Volumes/TheDriveName/


Where TheDriveName is the name of the volume, works. However, this keeps reoccurring.


Is Apple working on this. It bother me that they came out with Version 10.9.3 of the Server Software and did not fix this.

Jun 12, 2014 7:33 AM in response to Kenoli Oleari1

Same here. Internal drive partition goes invisible at irregular intervals. Once this happens, Time Machine views the drive as something new and undertakes a complete backup. I checked the system logs to see if anything looks strange. Backups appear normal until the drive goes dark. The ensuing backup attempt yields this message: "Forcing deep traversal on source". I'm not sure if this is simply TM's response to the drive disappearing, or if this is, in fact, the cause. See screenshot below. Start reading at the highlighted entry.


Other than the TM issues, I haven't seen any other ill effects. It is troubling though. I'm glad to find that I'm not the only one. Hopefully this means it's a software problem.


User uploaded file

Jun 12, 2014 8:28 AM in response to Kenoli Oleari1

Apple contacted me recently and asked me to run a beta version of a fix to the operating system. I signed a confidentiality agreement and received a download that I have not installed yet. I presume Apple is monitoring this list, but some of you may want to contact them directly about this. It seems likely they would want others testing the modification.


It happens so infrequently on my machine that I'm not sure when I would have any data to send back to Apple.


It seems it may not be simply a "ghost" in the machine (as it is tempting to see it), but something connected to the Mavericks code.


--Kenoli

Volume becoming partially then fully hidden somehow

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