Startup drive disappear, MacOS X 10.4.3

L

lapod

Registered
I have lost the internal hard drive icon on my PowerBook G4 1.5Mhz 15" with MacOS 10.4.3, 1.125 GB RAM. The disk suddenly went off the desktop and also the sidebar together with a few other problems at the time, leading to a Finder crash and restart. I had been working in Photoshop CS and Acrobat Professional 6.

Now the drive shows up in Spotlight, and I access the main level of the drive if I open it from there. It also shows up in Disk Utility, and running disk verify shows no error. Same with Applejack and Yasu. I have tried Disk Utility from the disk and also from Tiger install CD. The disk functions normally in all other respects, except it refuses to mount an image to the desktop or to the sidebar. Changing Finder preferences does not help. Other disks mount, through FireWire and USB (iPod shuffle), and the Finder preferences for having them show up or hide also works.

When I get the drive to show through Spotlight, so that I have a Finder window with the icon showing, the icon is grey. I have tried dragging it back into the sidebar, but it just pops right out again, without showing -- a little nudge in the bar, that’s all.

I have also made it appear by doing a show hidden files command. That brings it to show on the desktop, but then it disappears again when I turn that function off. So it looks like the main drive mysteriously has been set to be hidden from view.

I use FileVault, but can’t think of any connection. The drive also does not show up under other accounts on the same machine.

There is one other symtom which disturbs me. It seems the drive has filled up 2-3 GB more since before this happened. I had it steady around 21 GB free, and now it is down towards 18, with no reason in terms of intended new files. It this is some kind of cache or swap files, they have not been cleaned by Applejack Deep Clean procedure, which is one of the procedures I have run.
 
In Finder's preferences you can choose whether volumes are shown in the sidebar and on the Desktop. Maybe one of those settings was lost when working "hard". About the free space: Heavy photoshopping _always_ makes Mac OS X add virtual memory files on the harddrive. That space is won again after rebooting or after quitting Photoshop...
 
Yes, it’s just that none of these normal measures work for me now. For the internal startup drive, that is -- Finder‘s preferences does work for other an external FireWire drive and other media I attach. The only way to see the internal drive on the desktop is to turn on show hidden files (through terminal command), which brings on all the other hidden files, and the question why worries me quite a bit.
 
just to mention, I have also tried the trick of deleting the com.apple.finder.plist, in case someone would think of that. In my case, I did not expect it to work, since that file is located to a user login library, and the drive icon is gone from all user spaces.
 
So it's *HIDDEN*, right? You do see it on the Desktop if you activate to show hidden files? Then that's easy: Unhide it. If it has a "." at the beginning of its name, seriously: Remove that dot. If you get info on it and it is "hidden", remove the tick from that...
 
There was no dot -- but it showed up by running the show hidden files command, as you say. However, unhiding it by removing the tick was not possible, as there was no tick. Apparently this is a recent freak problem that has hit some users, and I was pointed to this thread that had an answer: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=1387733 . Look down to Rosyna, who gives this advice: "If you have the developer tools installed (xcode and the like) enter this command in the terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal):

/Developer/Tools/SetFile -a v /

Then restart the finder.

Otherwise try using FileBuddy to unset the invisible bit. http://www.skytag.com/filebuddy/

Or try deleting the Volume icon, or the .DS_Store or the Icon file inside the root of your HD. "

As for the person who opened the thread in the Apple Discussions forum, the Developer command fixed the problem for me. People who don’t have the Developer Tools installed, should look for one of the other solutions pointed out.

Thanks for taking interest, this seems to be a new problem, hopefully soon fixed with a system update.
 
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