MBP does not show in Finder when booted from clone

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Level 1

44 points

MBP does not show in Finder when booted from clone

My mid-2009 MBP works perfectly, except for one thing - when booted from a clone on an external drive, it neither appears in the Finder nor does it show in System Preferences as a start up option.

Holding down the alt key on Restart works, showing both the external clone and the internal MBP disk.

I would like to test 10.11 soon, but the clone needs to show the MBP disk to enable me to revert to Mavericks if necessary.

Can you see what might be wrong, and how to fix it?

I have a clone of the previous setup, running with Snow Leopard and this works perfectly.

MacBook Pro, OS X Mavericks (10.9.5), null

Posted on Oct 8, 2015 6:03 AM

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Answer 1

Eric Root

Level 10

684,033 points

Oct 8, 2015 9:00 AM in response to citroenDS

Finder/Preferences/Sidebar - are the items under Shared enabled?

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Answer 2

citroenDS Author

Level 1

44 points

Oct 9, 2015 2:58 AM in response to Eric Root

Thanks for responding, Eric. I was sure I’d checked the Finder preferences. But I have 3 clones of the MBP, and when I looked again at the clone I was using, the checkbox for showing external disks was not ticked. When I did so, the MBP appeared both in the Finder and as a start up option. That looked like an easy fix to a careless oversight...

However, both the other 2 clones already had all the options under ‘Devices’ ticked, and 2 out of 3 options ticked under ‘Sharing’ (computers and servers). And when I boot from these backups, neither of them will show the MBP in the Finder or as a startup option.

Any idea what’s going on - and how I can get all 3 clones to work correctly?

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Answer 3

citroenDS Author

Level 1

44 points

Oct 10, 2015 10:18 AM in response to citroenDS

I think I might have solved it. I trashed the finder.plist file and now everything appears to be back to normal. The MBP is showing again in the Finder and in System Preferences start up options, when booting from any of the clones.

I noticed that there are several other, individually identified finder.lists >

can anyone tell me what these are? Presumably it is safe to delete them?

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Answer 4

Eric Root

Level 10

684,033 points

Oct 11, 2015 9:01 AM in response to citroenDS

Mine all show as zero KB, so they really aren't using any space. If you want to delete them, move them to your Desktop, restart and see if Finder is normal. If so, delete them.

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Answer 5

citroenDS Author

Level 1

44 points

Oct 14, 2015 2:17 PM in response to citroenDS

Trashing the .plist file seems to have sorted it. Everything has been working normally again for a few days now. Hope it works for you if you are here for the same reason.

(Would still be interested to know why so many individually named files are being created - and not just in Finder...)

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