External drive not showing in sidebar

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Level 1

9 points

External drive not showing in sidebar

I have set my Finder Preferences for the Sidebar to show connected servers and external drives. However, I can not get a mounted external drive to show under Devices in the sidebar. It has appeared previously, but now I can't get it to stick on the sidebar when dragging the external drive from the finder window to the sidebar. Noticed some older posts on the Internet from others experiencing this issue. Is there a fix?

MacBook Pro RD, early 2013, OS 10.8.5, with attached Dell external monitor.

Posted on Mar 13, 2014 7:32 AM

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Answer 1

Eric Root

Level 10

684,039 points

Mar 13, 2014 10:25 AM in response to newsads

Can you see it in Disk Utility? If so, try the mount command in the top menu bar.

You can also try deleting the Finder .plist.

In Finder hold down the option/alt key while selecting the Go menu item. Select Library. Then go to Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist. Move the .plist to your desktop.

Re-launch Finder by logging out/in and test. If it works okay, delete the plist from the desktop.

If the same, return the .plist to where you got it from, overwriting the newer ones.

If you want to make your user library permanently visible, run the below command in Applications/Terminal.

chflags nohidden ~/Library/

You will need to do that after any updates.

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