External Drives Not Showing Up In Sidebar Since MacOS 10.12.3 Update

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External Drives Not Showing Up In Sidebar Since MacOS 10.12.3 Update

I updated to 10.12.3 (from 10.12.2) on January 29, 2017. Since then, my external drives are not showing up in the Finder sidebar. The icons for the drives appear on the desktop, and Disk Utility shows that they are correctly mounted. There is no problem accessing them via the desktop icons.

I have tried switching USB ports to no avail.

My Finder preferences are all correct: "External Disks" is checked (as is everything else) under "Show these items in the sidebar". I have tried unchecking them and re-checking them plus reboot.

Reboots & reset SMC do not help. MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2010), 8GB memory, core i5.

This is not a userland problem since the drives showed up just fine before the update and I have not changed any settings. Looks to be a bug in 10.12.3. Apple please take note.

MacBook Pro, macOS Sierra (10.12.3)

Posted on Jan 31, 2017 10:34 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Luis Sequeira1

Level 9

65,024 points

Jan 31, 2017 10:49 AM in response to smilgram

Maybe all you need is... in the sidebar, move your mouse next to "Devices". The word "Show" will appear. Click it.

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Answer 2

Jun 12, 2017 12:22 PM in response to spawn777

Do you see "Favorites", "Shared", "Tags" in the sidebar?

You may try resetting the sidebar preferences and see if that fixes it.

Press command-shift-G and type or paste the following exactly to open the Preferences folder

~/Library/Preferences

(or reach this folder in any other way you prefer; remember that ~ means your home, and the Library folder inside it is what you want, then Preferences inside, but the Library folder is hidden by default)

Drag the file com.apple.sidebarlists.plist out of this folder and somewhere else (like your desktop). Log out and back in. You will have to set your sidebar items again, but hopefully the problem you came here for help with should be fixed. If not, you can drag the plist file, log out and back in to go back to the previous sidebar.

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