What is This?

J

Jackrushing

Registered
I am using a Mac Pro, running 10.5.6. A couple of days ago, four little
straight bars appeared under my desktop Hard drive Icon. What is this for?
As far as I can tell, nothing has been affected, but how can I get rid of these?
 
Screen shot, please!

Or, at least a few words describing those lines. Such as, under the title, or, under the icon itself. Are they the width of the icon? Are they very close, or spread apart? Do the lines travel with the drive icon when you drag it around? Do they change in any way if you restart your Mac?
Are there any other icons on your desktop that have lines under them?
Is your hard drive the default drive icon, or one that you have customized?
 
Sorry, I can not make a screen shot at present. Instead of the four little bars under the
hard drive Icon, I now have two letters VX. They travel with the drive when I drag it.
It is my default drive Icon. I have not customized it, unless it was by accident. There is
one other Icon on the desktop now with the four little straight up and down bars under it,
The Dictionary. Could this have been caused by some sheet music I placed on the keyboard the other day? It was rather heavy.
 
It's possible. Have you tried renaming the hard drive back to what it was originally called?
 
Jackrushing said:
Sorry, I can not make a screen shot at present. Instead of the four little bars under the
hard drive Icon, I now have two letters VX.
Click to expand...

Why can't you make a screen shot? That would really help....

The letters VX are also 4 lines, eh? Any coincidence there?

Did the letters replace the drive name, or are they attached to the the icon itself and you still see the normal name of the drive volume?
 
When editing, or creating a new post. click on the Manage Attachments button in the Additional Options section. Browse to your screen shot file by clicking the Choose File button. Click the Upload button, and it's pretty much that simple. (don't forget to click the Submit Reply button, eh?)
 
Sorry, I still cannot get it to work. I have the picture on my desktop from
Preview, and it shows it in the Current Manage Attachments, tried all the
Upload Buttons, and even tried to drag and drop, but no luck.
 
Or . . . you can do what I do to provide useful pictures such as:

a19bbc0c.jpg


and get a Flickr, Photobucket or one of those free hosting pages.

Then you, too, can bring joy to the world with images of happiness:

Yippee.jpg


--J.D.
 
It may have to do with how full your HD is? Here is mine today:

38026c3a.jpg


and here is how it was some time ago when I was responding to another question:

HDGetInfo.jpg


It may be hard to see, but there are more "lines" or "bars" on the first and later picture.

--J.D.
 
From your picture, that's just the name of the hard drive. You can click once on the "VX" text there, wait a second for the edit to take, then type a new name for the hard drive.

Renaming the hard drive doesn't do anything to harm anything about OS X. You can rename it five times a minute if you so desire.

It looks like somehow you simply, inadvertently, renamed the hard drive. No harm, no foul. Just name it back to whatever you like.
 
Thanks All, I think I will let it stand as is. I will be careful not to put anything on the
keyboard in the future while the computer is on. Two good things came out of this, the
other one being that I think I can post a picture now. Cheers.
 
DeltaMac said:
If you randomly change the volume name, you do run the risk of software losing access to pref files and locations, because the file path has changed.
Click to expand...
This is certainly not likely -- applications do not access the hard drive by name. If they did, downloadable programs in disk image format that include a link to the Applications folder (you've seen them: Adium is a good example -- it includes the Adium application and a link to the /Applications folder on the disk image itself) wouldn't work at all, because how could the developers know the name of your hard drive?

Not to mention the havoc that would wreak when cloning your boot drive to a differently-named drive!

By opening the Terminal and visiting /Volumes, one can plainly see that the root of your boot drive is mounted as "/", and there exists a link with your hard drive's name to that same directory. Applications use the root directory path(e.g, "/") to access your files and Preferences folder and what-not -- the path with the name of your hard drive is there for convenience, mostly, used by some programs like the Finder for display purposes and non-essential purposes only.

You can freely change the name of your hard drive as much or as little as you want, to whatever you want, without worry. Everything will work just fine.

You can even change the name of your hard drive while programs are running -- try it: open iTunes, play a song, and in the middle of the song, change your hard drive name... the song keeps playing.

UNIX (the underlying operating system of Mac OS X) does not use hard drive "names" to access the data on the drive(s). It uses cryptic "device" names like "sda" and "sdb" and such which you have little-to-no control over and are determined during boot time by the operating system, hardware and BIOS (or Open Firmware or EFI in later Macs).

Of course, if you're a developer and write code with absolute paths (a very horrible way to code), then this could affect you... but you'd have to, a) be a programmer, and b) be a really horrible programmer.

Feel free to change away.
 
Last edited:
DeltaMac said:
That's the name of your hard drive volume. Just change the name to whatever you like.
If you randomly change the volume name, you do run the risk of software losing access to pref files and locations, because the file path has changed.
Click to expand...

I remember this being the case early on in older versions of Mac OS (before OS X), but that usually was bad programming on the part of the 3rd-party software developer. Usually, one was asked for the path of the installation, regardless of the name, and then the app (if properly coded) would use the paths configured. This is assuming said software developer used an installer, since there were others that just had you drag the application or a folder containing the application to your hard drive.
 
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