Display Hard Disks on Desktop or anywhere

T

TheQL

Registered
Hi,

I guess (or hope) this is newbie question, but I cannot figure out how to access the harddrive on OS X.

i googled my pants off but all i found was selecting " show hard disks" in the finder preferences...
well, this does not do the trick...

searching the forum or the faq's somehow didn't help either...

problem description: all i can access via the finder is my home dir and the applications, removeable media appears on the desktop, network volumes do, but i just cannot see any harddisk. neither the partition OS X is installed to nor the other partitions of the drive.

I have several other installation of OS 9.2 on the computer, including on the first partition of the harddrive, os x is on the 3rd i believe.... system is a grey G4 with Dual 1GHz CPU's if this information is of any need... (actually it is not my own Mac)

but since OS X appears to funtion alright (browsing, network, etc.) I hope it is just a user error (my error:() that the hard disks do not display.

is there a need to mount the volumes via the command line (i am not a linux newbie so i hope i should manage that, if there was such a need), but i am quite unsure, because i cannot find anything on the web telling me i needed to mount the drives.

so please help, i feel like a complete idiot....
 
TheQL,

Hmm. . . When you log in to OS X, you have an account (w/username and password). Do you know what kind of account you're using?

If you are using an administator account, you will be able to access the hard drive. If you are using a guest account, you will only be able to access your home folder. Unix security.

Is it possible that the owner of the computer uses the main account (adminstrator), and you use a guest account?

Doug
 
good idea..... but there is just one user account on that computer and that ought to the administrator account, right?

is there a way to log out and login as, e.g., root onto the desktop or is root access only possible in the shell...

anyway, during the installation i was asked to set up a user.... nothing about root or administrator password, is that correct?

EDIT: too bad i don't have access to the computer right now :( (it's official holiday in germany)
 
The account that's set up when OS X is installed is an administrator account.

Hmm. . .

What happens when you go to Finder and type command-n? It should show a network icon and your hard drive icon.

From a file dialog window, drag the horizontal slider all the way to the left. You should see your hard drive.

Do any of these work?


If not,

Try going to the terminal and typing:

cd /

and then press return.

After that, type

ls -l

and press return.

You should see the contents of the root directory of your hard drive.

Doug
 
tnx, for your help, i will try that after the weekend... is there a sepcific way to access other partitions via the command shell? e.g. mount /dev/hda1 oder how are the disks numbered in the BSD subsystem?
 
so, there's the trick....

The Hard Disks where all named with a leading "."

is that the reason for them being invisible/hidden?

i used the harddisk tool to delete most of the partitions and created them newly with another name and now they are there! but i cannot delete the system hd of course so i wondered if there is another way to change the name of a harddisk....

changing the name in /Volumes/ does not help, the name get's replaced during reboot... but i could'nt find the name in, e.g. /fstab.* so can you change it manually or not?

plz help
 
Ah yes, that would be it. ".filename" tells OS X that this is an invisible file, rename them without the '.' and they should magically appear!
 
tnx, but i figured that already.... i just don't know how to rename that last hd which is the system hd....

the only way to access it is a link i created on the desktop or via the terminal (link created via terminal as well).... which works for most things but e.g. not to include the disk in searches....
 
Can you rename it using the Disk Utility in your Applications > Utilities folder?

If that does not work, you'll probably need to startup from another drive/CD...
 
hmmm... used that utility to rename the other drives, but for some reason that turned out to only work when deleting the drive and recreating it or do you think starting classic at startup an renaming the disk there could do the trick?

again i'd like to mention that that is not my computer and i do not access recently so i cannot test what you suggest immediately :(
 
try this:

make finder active (click on the desktop or sth) and from top menu select finder > preferences

there you have "Show items on desktop" be sure to have "hard disks" selected. or you can set "new finder window shows" to computer. Hope this does the magic :)
 
Access drives (but not the system drive, which is /) from the command line by going to

/volumes

Doug
 
ok, i guess i need to sum up what i already know and already did:

1. i used the terminal to go to /Volumes and creating symbolic links to the harddrives which were all called .NAME on the desktop using a linked name without a leading dot, since i do know, that *nix systems do consider such files as hidden -> i could access the hard drives from the desktop

2. i used the disk utility to rename the harddrives which forced me to delete them, which was not too big a problem apart from the system hd. so i deleted the symbolic links on the desktop, because all but the systemhd now appear correctly on the desktop as well as in the finder

3. i asked if there was a way to rename the system hd from within the system or if this worked if i renamed the system hd from classic when i choose to start that at boot or if that would not work or even cause trouble

4. tnx for your help until now anyway, although i actually found all that out by myself and now really just need an answer to my question in point 3
 
Since the boot drive does'nt appear in OS X, the safest way to rename this drive is to boot from an OS 9 CD or partition (assuming your mac still supports OS 9 booting). While booted from OS 9, the invisible drive will appear normally, since OS 9 does't hide files that start with a period. Click on the drive name and remove the period. I've done this before, and renaming a drive while booted into OS 9 should have no negative effects at all.
 
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