To the reader: If you are an experienced Mac user with good understanding in the OSX boot process and especially the mount procedure of the internal HDD, please read this and I'll appreciate your assistance.
Thank You for your patience reading this long issue.
Platform: iMac 2013, 1T fusion drive, original partitions (nothing was changed), running Yosemite (newest).
I think it would be worth mentioning (or on the other hand may not be relevant) that Paralles is running on this iMac under OS X (not as a separate boot).
The Problem: The hard disk icon on the desktops top right corner (enabled by Finder->Preferences->Sidebar->Hard Disks turned on) usually titled "Macintosh HD" changed its title to a very long gibberish string. Other than that, I couldn't identify any operational issues with the iMac. For now ;-)
![gibberish.png]( "gibberish.png")
It annoyed me so I did some digging and compared the with a Mini Mac that has the same 1 Tera bit fusion drive (no Paralles is on that system).
That's what I found:
1. Directory "/Volumes" is empty, ls -la /Volumes shows nothing!
On the healthy (Mini Mac) system you can see that a link exists :
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root admin 1 May 23 10:41 Macintosh HD -> /
2. Applying "diskutil list" on the iMac:
![iMac diskutil.png]( "iMac diskutil.png")
While on the Mini Mac (healthy system):
![Mac Mini diskutil.png]( "Mac Mini diskutil.png")
You can see that on the Mac Mini (healthy) system "/dev/disk2" is mounted while on the iMac this mount doesn't exist! That may be related to the fact that "/Volumes" doesn't contain the relevant link (as described in (1.) )
3. Applying "diskutil info /" on the iMac:
![iMac diskutil info .png]( "iMac diskutil info .png")
Looks very wrong... believe it or not this system works...
4. I didn't succeed to rename the disk icon gibberish title (the icon that is located usually on the top right desktop corner) back to "Macintosh HD". It stayed very long gibberish string. even "disk utility" didn't help. Each time I tried to change it the system produced an irrelevant error message telling me "The name xxx can't be used. Try using a name withe fewer characters, or with no punctuation marks"
5. "Disk Utility" behaves differently on the two systems: On the Mini Mac (healthy) system it shows a "Logical Volume Group" icon named "Macintosh HD" and under it, aligned to the right it shows another "Macintosh HD" icon for the "/" mount point.
On the other hand "Disk Utility" on the broken iMac shows alright the main "Logical Volume Group" icon, but underneath it, there is an icon with the gibberish title and the description below for that icon says:
Mount Point: Not mounted
Format: Logical Partition
Owners Enabled: -
Number of Folders: -
Capacity: 1.12 TB
Available: -
Used: -
Number of Files: -
![Disk Utility on iMac.png]( "Disk Utility on iMac.png")
My Question: I'm not so deeply familiar with OSX (more of a Linux/Unix guy) but it definitely seems like something is broken with the mount process during boot. The question is why it is broken, and how to fix it.
I'm not sure that the missing link under "/Volumes" is the original cause of the problem. How these dedicated links under "/Volumes" directory are supposed to get there? I was not sure if adding manually the "Macintosh HD" link to root is the right solution, maybe some boot script that uses other config files adds this link automatically... More than that I'm not absolutely sure about that link permissions and ownership and how to create it...
A bigger question that I have is how the system is working at all if the mount of the main logical partition failed ??? Very strange...
For the cause of the problem, my suspicious is falling on the Paralles app since it the only program that may mass with partitions, but this is just a gut feeling and there is a good chance that I'm wrong. Maybe something went wrong during the migration to Yosemite.
Thanks for you patience
Hope you can help
Thank You for your patience reading this long issue.
Platform: iMac 2013, 1T fusion drive, original partitions (nothing was changed), running Yosemite (newest).
I think it would be worth mentioning (or on the other hand may not be relevant) that Paralles is running on this iMac under OS X (not as a separate boot).
The Problem: The hard disk icon on the desktops top right corner (enabled by Finder->Preferences->Sidebar->Hard Disks turned on) usually titled "Macintosh HD" changed its title to a very long gibberish string. Other than that, I couldn't identify any operational issues with the iMac. For now ;-)
It annoyed me so I did some digging and compared the with a Mini Mac that has the same 1 Tera bit fusion drive (no Paralles is on that system).
That's what I found:
1. Directory "/Volumes" is empty, ls -la /Volumes shows nothing!
On the healthy (Mini Mac) system you can see that a link exists :
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root admin 1 May 23 10:41 Macintosh HD -> /
2. Applying "diskutil list" on the iMac:
While on the Mini Mac (healthy system):
You can see that on the Mac Mini (healthy) system "/dev/disk2" is mounted while on the iMac this mount doesn't exist! That may be related to the fact that "/Volumes" doesn't contain the relevant link (as described in (1.) )
3. Applying "diskutil info /" on the iMac:
Looks very wrong... believe it or not this system works...
4. I didn't succeed to rename the disk icon gibberish title (the icon that is located usually on the top right desktop corner) back to "Macintosh HD". It stayed very long gibberish string. even "disk utility" didn't help. Each time I tried to change it the system produced an irrelevant error message telling me "The name xxx can't be used. Try using a name withe fewer characters, or with no punctuation marks"
5. "Disk Utility" behaves differently on the two systems: On the Mini Mac (healthy) system it shows a "Logical Volume Group" icon named "Macintosh HD" and under it, aligned to the right it shows another "Macintosh HD" icon for the "/" mount point.
On the other hand "Disk Utility" on the broken iMac shows alright the main "Logical Volume Group" icon, but underneath it, there is an icon with the gibberish title and the description below for that icon says:
Mount Point: Not mounted
Format: Logical Partition
Owners Enabled: -
Number of Folders: -
Capacity: 1.12 TB
Available: -
Used: -
Number of Files: -
My Question: I'm not so deeply familiar with OSX (more of a Linux/Unix guy) but it definitely seems like something is broken with the mount process during boot. The question is why it is broken, and how to fix it.
I'm not sure that the missing link under "/Volumes" is the original cause of the problem. How these dedicated links under "/Volumes" directory are supposed to get there? I was not sure if adding manually the "Macintosh HD" link to root is the right solution, maybe some boot script that uses other config files adds this link automatically... More than that I'm not absolutely sure about that link permissions and ownership and how to create it...
A bigger question that I have is how the system is working at all if the mount of the main logical partition failed ??? Very strange...
For the cause of the problem, my suspicious is falling on the Paralles app since it the only program that may mass with partitions, but this is just a gut feeling and there is a good chance that I'm wrong. Maybe something went wrong during the migration to Yosemite.
Thanks for you patience
Hope you can help
Last edited: