can't be opened because the original item can't be found

I had this "...original item can't be found" problem on High Sierra, but only with FAT32 volumes on an SD card or USB drive. The strange thing was that Disk Utility could see the volumes correctly, and via Terminal I could read and write to the volumes too. So it looked like it was just Finder that was unhappy with FAT32. I had to call Apple Support to finally sort this out: All I had to do was to reset the SMC (System Management Controller) using the process at

How to reset the System Management Controller (SMC) on your Mac - Apple Support

There seem to be no nasty side effects from having done this, and now I can read and write FAT32 absolutely fine. My machine is a brand new 13" MacBook Pro with Touchbar, so I don't know if this fix will apply to other hardware.

I realise that the well known issue with files larger than 2.2GB on FAT32 still exists under High Sierra, but that doesn't worry me personally for now. I also realise that ExFAT will solve this problem, but my sole need to read FAT32 is because my SD cards are from a portable audio recorder that will only work with FAT32. The bottom line is: High Sierra does love FAT32 after all.

I just found a solution that worked for me via the link below:

https://www.cnet.com/news/fix-shared-computer-not-found-in-finder/

The first option worked for me.

"To fix this problem, you simply need to relaunch the Finder, and it will re-populate the list of shared devices. To do this, you can do one of the following:

1. 1)Hold the Option key and right-click the Finder icon in the Dock, then select Relaunch.
2. 2)Press Option-Command-Escape or choose Force Quit from the Apple menu, then select the Finder and click Relaunch.
3. 3)Log out and log back in to your user account

"

Same issue here... QNAP NAS. 10.13 on 3x macbook pros. 1x macbook. Found this works every time but should not have to do this.. Please fix Apple.

1. 1)Hold the Option key and right-click the Finder icon in the Dock, then select Relaunch.

This happens to me on occasion. I don't know the right answer yet, but here are some ideas based in what I did when I encountered this yesterday

1. Turn off AFP and make sure that announce Time Machine over SMB is enabled for Time Machine service.
2. Reboot Mac

Doing that fix Time Machine backups on both of my Mac computers.

Try that and let us know how it worked.

If you're getting the can't be opened because the original item can't be found error on High Sierra when using a USB drive with FAT32 and other filesystems, try this fix,

1. open "Disk Utility" application
2. select the problem filesystem/volume in the panel on the left.
3. Click the filesystem/volume name that is displayed in the main panel to edit it, change it from something like "DRIVE" (upper case) to "drive" (lower case)

Bingo! fixed. worked for me.

This fix (changing the name of the filesystem/volume) might also work for network drives.

Wonder when this problem will be solved. I have the same problem already for some time, on my older Mac and now still on my 2017 MacBook Pro.

The only workaround I have is: Open Finder and then in menu Go, select connect to server (Command+K) and then connect to ip of my NAS (or network connection) directly.

Also rebooting my laptop helps for a short time.

I have the same problem with a Synology NAS and MacBook Pro connected via wifi. Force quitting and relaunching Finder worked for me. It seems my NAS was in sleep mode until I relaunched Finder. I heard it turn on and saw the status light change as soon as Finder came back up. Not sure if there's a way to wake it up without relaunching Finder, though.

I used to be able to share the screen of my iMac from my MacBook Pro all the time but suddenly I started getting the 'original item can't be found' message. Thank you for the tip about force quitting Finder. 🙂 That works for me to be able to connect with iMac again.

I am experiencing the same with my WD Duo drive which I have had for three or so years, and used successfully with my MacBook Pro. It has, more recently, become extremely slow and now I can find no solution to this latest matter of 'cannot find original item'. (I can access the same drive and 'see' folders/files from a Windows 10 machine.) I am seriously thinking of going back to the Windows environment altogether.

Similar issue.

New 2017 iMac that is wireless connected to a router (ASUS) with a USB hard drive connected to it. Works perfectly on Windows 10, but on the Mac, only certain folders work with certain users and I cannot log out of the net drive. OS X will not let me eject or disconnect.

There are no options or controls, I feel locked out.

Relaunching Finder has not worked for me. I am currently trying a reset of my WD drive (the reset is still running after 27 hours!) I feel I am grasping at strays. (Was all visible from my alternate Windows 10 laptop!)

Having recently updated to Mac OS High Sierra I suddenly got this error as well. By inspection I notice that all flash disks formatted with Fat32 work just fine, but those with exFAT do not. I converted one of the flash drives from exFAT to FAT32 and all is well.

I think the developers may want to figure out some incompatibility that has been inadvertently introduced with the upgrade to Mac OS High Sierra. I have a 2015 MacBook Pro as well as a late 2010 MacBook Air.

It happened after the latest OS update

My drive is formatted in Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
So I can not even try it on a Win.PC
I tried all the mentioned solutions here but nothing helped me any further :-(
I DO NOT WANT TO LOOSE MY DATA !!!

This just started for me today on my 2015 MacBook Pro 15" when Time Machine said it can't find my Drobo5N on the network to do a backup, but nothing was wrong with the Drobo and I can mount it on the iMac. Then I found out that I can't mount my Apple 3TB TimeCapsule, or my QNAP TS-453A RAID either.

And prior to this my Time machine backups to both my Drobo and Time Capsule were running fine, every other hour for each, right up until about 1PM today. But then all of a sudden I got the error and can't mount any network drives from the shared menu on the left sidebar of the finder window. I've rebooted the Drobo, the Apple TC Router, and the MacBook.

The cmd-K trick to enter the IP address mounts the drives fine. Also everything is fine loading shared network drives from the sidebar of my 2015 27" iMac.

I hadn't done anything major to my MacBook other than all the usual Mac OS X 10.12.6 updates (none in the past few days), i.e. no new OS or anything, except that right before this happened I was asked to update Java 8 and allowed it, but even though the updated Java is deactivated in Safari it shouldn't affect finder.

Is there a permanent fix for this that I haven't seen posted? I can't keep manually mounting the TM partition's IP address and leave them on the desktop for them to be found.