External drives stop showing up in Finder

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Level 3

572 points

External drives stop showing up in Finder

I've been having a problem lately where external drives, like thumb drives for example, will not show up in the Finder, even though they are mounted. If I pull them out then I get a warning that the drive was disconnected improperly. While they are plugged in, they show up in Disk Utility. Also, I'm running Parallels and the disk shows up in Parallels windows -- NOT as being mounted to the windows virtual machine but as being mounted on the Mac side.

Anyone know what causes this? I'm pretty sure the problem goes away when I restart the machine, but I'd like to know why it is happening.

Thanks

Bob

iMac, OS X El Capitan (10.11.5)

Posted on Sep 23, 2016 3:08 PM

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Answer 1

Eric Root

Level 10

685,293 points

Sep 23, 2016 8:20 PM in response to Bob Sabiston

Might be a corrupt .plist.

Do a backup, preferably 2 backups on 2 separate drives.

Go to Finder and select your user/home folder. With that Finder window as the front window, either select Finder/View/Show View options or go command - J. When the View options opens, check ’Show Library Folder’. That should make your user library folder visible in your user/home folder. Select Library. Then go to Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist. Move the .plist to your desktop.

Re-launch Finder by restarting the computer 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 one.

Thanks to leonie for some information contained in this

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