HD is missing

Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
Hi!



I just awakened my laptop from it's sleep and the first thing I noticed, was that the HD icon was missing the desktop.

So I thought, I must have deleted it or something, so I check in the Finder and it's gone ..



Maybe a setting has been changed to hide it? I open the preferences, but no, show HD is checked, so it should be there!



I'm now running the Disk Utility to check for problems, but so far nothing seems to be working

Any ideas on this one?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 4
    yamayama Posts: 427member
    Try going into View > Arrange by > Name while on the desktop to re-arrange all of the icons.



    Do you have an external monitor connected?
  • Reply 2 of 4
    That didn't work



    No I'm just using my laptop, so no external stuff whatsoever.
  • Reply 3 of 4
    So I've managed to find my HD by surfing to '/' in safari. It opens up a finder window and I can see the HD icon, but it's semi-transparent, like one of those hidden files.



    No one else any tips or something I should try?
  • Reply 4 of 4
    yamayama Posts: 427member
    Hmmm, I wonder if the drive has somehow become marked as hidden. Could you try the following:



    Open up a terminal window and type "cd /Volumes" then type "ls -al"



    What is the output? It should be something like this:



    Code:


    drwxrwxrwt@ 5 root admin 170 28 Sep 11:23 .

    drwxrwxr-t 34 root admin 1224 24 Sep 22:24 ..

    lrwxr-xr-x 1 root admin 1 28 Sep 11:23 Macintosh HD -> /







    If the name of your hard disk has a period in front of it, that will mean it's hidden. To fix that, just rename the drive.



    If there is an @ symbol in the first column that means that the file has extended attributes - one of those attributes can mean the file is set to be hidden. To solve that there's a couple of things you can do. For example, install the developer tools and use the setFile command. See here for a details on how to use this command.



    The last thing that can determine if a file is hidden is if it is in the .hidden file. It's located at the root level of your boot drive and you should be able to edit it with any plain text editor. To check this file, type the following into the Terminal: cat /.hidden
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