Folder Background Won't "Stick"

M

magicdanw

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I'm not a big Mac user, but my girlfriend is, and for Valentine's day I've gotten her a heart-shaped necklace pendant that is also a flash drive. I want to set a cute picture of us as the volume folder background, but every time I eject the drive and put it back in, the background has reset to white. It does the same with a plain colored background, so it has nothing to do with the picture. Also, the picture is located on the drive itself. Please, can anyone help me out here? I hope to get this working by Saturday.
 
Well I just tried with a flash drive too and it did the same thing you described. I even tried on the G5 & Intel Mac (in my signature) and the same results happened. So I am at a lost, sorry.
 
If you use the icon view, you should see the background colour you set for any Finder window with icon view. I do with my flash drives. I have not tried that with background images.
 
I am using icon view, and even just setting a color background, Finder forgets it when I unplug and replug the drive. :( Since Satcomer had the problem too, I'm wondering if perhaps this is a bug in some versions of OS X? For the record, I have 1.5.5 installed.
 
I just tried it with an HFS+ formatted flash drive, both with the image file itself stored on and off the flash drive, and it worked both ways -- the picture stuck even after an eject and mount procedure.

I'm thinking it has to do with the fact that the flash drive is formatted as FAT32. Reformatting it to HFS+ will allow you to do your background thing, but won't retain cross-platform compatibility.
 
OS X stores folder settings, like view settings and background colors/pictures, in invisible files named ".DS_Store". The problem with .DS_Store files is that they ARE visible on Windows, where they serve no purpose, which is confusing and annoying for Windows users. It seems like Apple has "fixed" this problem by making it so OS X does not create these .DS_Store files on FAT-formatted drives. At least, I have noticed this behavior on my machine. Some quick Google searching reveals evidence to the contrary, however — a lot of people complain that OS X does create these files, and they want it to stop (proof that you can't please everyone!). Some of these complaints are fairly recent, too, so I'm not sure exactly what to think.

The simplest solution would be to reformat as Mac OS Extended (AKA HFS+) and then find some way to use it on the Windows side (I've heard of something called MacDrive).

If you really wanted to, you could manually copy a .DS_Store file from a Mac OS Extended disk to your FAT disk. That would copy over the folder settings, including the background image setting. It's a convoluted process, but it's doable. It would involve creating a dummy disk image, configuring the settings there, going into Terminal and copying the invisible file from your dummy volume to your flash drive. I just ran a little test with disk images, and it seems to work.
 
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