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allan.nyholm

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Nov 22, 2007
2,316
2,574
Aalborg, Denmark
Does anyone have an explanation for this in the Finder sidebar? Notice that my drives are symbolized using folders instead of their external and Time Machine drives. "Super hurtig" is a SSD and is my Time Machine backup drive for now.

On a fresh boot all drives have their corresponding icon to let me identify what they are. But, after I rearrange them by holding the left mouse button and move one above the other this is the result:


Skærmbillede 2020-09-14 kl. 13.13.36.png

Any tips, ideas or fixes? Re-launching Finder doesn't help. Logging out doesn't help. A clean boot does help. Often a restart even doesn't fix this issue either.

macOS 10.15.6 on non-beta. Tried beta with the supplemental update for 10.15.6 just recently before I opted out of beta and reinstalled macOS Catalina 10.15.6 directly from my USB drive made following Apple's instructions.

The difference for this more recent installation and my previous ones are that I am now using a A400 Kingston SSD 960Gb - I have merged the internal HD with my Kingston SSD for a large Fusion drive - the previous installation didn't use this feature and I was merely having the SSD with all my data on it. For some reason I made a Fusion Drive again.
The Fusion Drive feature didn't make this issue appear as the Finder exhibited the same behaviour on just a macOS installation on the new Kingston SSD

The issue with folder symbols instead of drive symbols appears to be only present in the Finder app and not in Open/Save windows for instance.
 

Taz Mangus

macrumors 604
Mar 10, 2011
7,815
3,504
I just tried what you described, rearrange the drives in sidebar and for me the icons did not turn to folder icons, they stayed as drive icons.

Some things to try:
  • Do a SMC and PRAM reset.
  • Boot into Safe Mode, login to your user account and see if the issue happens and then boot back to normal mode. See if the issue now happens in normal boot mode. This will cause the system caches to be recreated.
  • Download and run the latest Catalina installer. This will refresh the system files and won't touch your user files.
  • Create a new clean user account, login to the new user and see if the issue happens. If issue does not happen in the new user account, then you could look at maybe using the new user account to add in the things that you have in your current user account and see when the issue happens.
 

allan.nyholm

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Nov 22, 2007
2,316
2,574
Aalborg, Denmark
@Taz Mangus Thank you for your tips.. I found the culprit. It's the BetterZip 5 Finder extension that's causing this. Turning it off by just removing the checkbox in System Preferences -> Extensions -> Finder extensions eliminates my issue after a relaunch of Finder. Before hand I took all your tips and applied them(except for the reinstallation, safe boot and new user part because this installation is only a few days old)

The issue popped up right away with SIP back in effect and nvram cleared. I didn't initially think that it would help and but I didn't want to not try clearing those. When I saw the issue come back just moments after macOS had come to the Desktop and I saw the drives become folders right before my eyes I went looking for what I might have done to the Finder - didn't occur to me before that it was BetterZip causing this. I will investigate to see if I might have made a mistake with BetterZip 5 or if I ought to file a bug report. I think I will file a report with the author of BetterZip anyway just to alert him of this.

Thank you again.
 
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