Hidden drives\not on desktop?

[rotlex]

I've been reading about certain issues with Firewire\USB drives not mounting, but has anyone seen this? Drive mounts, is accessible in Disk Utility, you can even open it from there. Does NOT show up on desktop or in Finder side bar. (Yes, options to have them appear show up there).

Strangest thing, is, see screen shot, they DO appear when opened through disk utility, but appears "grayed out or hidden".

Am I missing something simple here?

 

[zephead]

Are you able to go to it by typing /Volumes/yourharddrive into the "Go to folder" option in the Finder's "Go" menu?

 

[ScienceMac]

Something similar has happened to me as well. I somehow think parallels might be involved when mounting volumes or so - do you have the latest build parallels installed?
Here is my workaround (might work from terminal as well, I am new to mac and dont know the commands):
1. from parallels go to windows explorer.
2. you must have the mac-disk (the root directory) connected to parallels (can be configured in VM-dialog).
3. In the root directory should be a hidden folder "volumes" (so you might need to turn on listing of invisible files in windows explorer.
4. in that folder are the mount points (as far as I know) of all drives being mounted in Mac OS X.
5. If there is a hidden folder indicating a hidden disk (not showing up on Mac desktop), go to folder properties in explorer and turn invisiblty off.
6. you might need to restart mac os X or go to diskutility and deactivate and afterwards activate that drive.

hope this is understandable and helps!

 

[notsofatjames]

can you click mount or something similar in disk utility. Or does it say un-mount?

 

[rotlex]

Are you able to go to it by typing /Volumes/yourharddrive into the "Go to folder" option in the Finder's "Go" menu?

Yeah, that's the strangest part. Both disks that I'm having the issue with are accessible this way, or, through disk utility itself, yet they still don't appear on the desktop, or sidebar.

They were fine yesterday, until I rebooted this morning as well.

To the other posters; Don't have parallels installed, but fusion, and it does not appear to be an issue there. And yeah, I can unmount and mount in disk utility, even access, just not anywhere else?

Thanks again.

 

[rotlex]

Ok, posting this as I have found a fix, but am majorly perplexed as to what is causing this. I posted this same question over on the Apple boards, and came accross this link http://www.pinkmutant.com/articles/invisible.html

In a nutshell, it describes how to change the attributes via script or Terminal on anything from a file to a volume using dev tools. I tried these, and they did not work. In my sheer and utter frustration, I removed the drives from my Leopard machine, and plugged them into my old G5 still running Tiger. It FIXED the issue. Or I should say, I was able to use "SetFile" from a command line to change the invisible attribute. Something I was NOT able to do under Leopard, although I never received an error when issuing the commands. (Even when run as Root).

After performing theses commands on the Tiger box, I plugged the drives back into my Leopard machine, and wala, the drives are once again visible.

Of course, I'm paranoid now that this is going to happen again, and am guessing this has to be a major bug somewhere with something.

Hope this helps someone out there if they run into this issue, and thanks again for the effort guys.

 

[iMattUK]

This fixed my problem with a missing USB pen drive

Thank-you - finally you have solved this very annoying problem and I can access my USB pen drive volume directly from the desktop again. This is definitely a side effect of using Parallels Desktop as that software sets the "invisibility" of USB drives when they are in use by Parallels. Sometimes it seems to get stuck in the invisible state, so this fix just makes them visible again.

The short version of the fix is below - thanks again

----
(From the terminal; if you're not comfortable with the terminal then use the link above which shows you how to do it using the GUI):

cd /Developer/Tools

./GetFileInfo /Volumes/<yourdrive>/
directory: "/Volumes/<yourdrive>"
attributes: aVbstclinmedz <--- note the "V" = invisible drive
created: 01/01/1904 00:00:00
modified: 05/09/2008 23:34:14

./SetFile -a v /Volumes/<yourdrive>/

./GetFileInfo /Volumes/<yourdrive>/
directory: "/Volumes/<yourdrive>"
attributes: avbstclinmedz <--- note the "v" = visible drive
created: 01/01/1904 00:00:00
modified: 05/09/2008 23:34:14

Force quit Finder.app and <yourdrive> will reappear on the desktop.

--
For anyone else having this trouble, let's put a few keywords in here to allow them to find this thread (I had trouble googling this issue): parallels vmware desktop usb pen drive volume finder invisible does not appear cannot be seen see missing invisible visible lost mac hidden vanished vanishing disk utility diskutility /volumes mount unmount eject

 

[durija]

Eureka! I hope. I've been searching for an answer to my missing USB flash drive for months now. I use VMWare Fusion, rather than Parallels, but I assume it has the same invisibility feature? Can't wait to try this at home.

I have what may be a similar problem with USB connected printers I can't see. I wonder if a variation this repair method would fix that?

Anybody else have a similar problem with other devices?

 

[Chief9999]

Firewire drives

Wow am I glad I found this topic. I'm haveing a similar problem but with multible firewire drives. I have a coolgear box firewire 800/usb 2 that has 4 drives in it I have three ide drives all four of my ide drives are not there but appear as greyed out. One of my ide drives did the same and one usb drive disappeared also. This happened after I updated to 10.5.4 I can not access the drives using the go path described above but diskwarrior and drive genius both see them. I pulled the drives and stuck them on the ide buss same issue. I wonder how they became invisible.... When I get home from work I'll try the terminal commands to change attributes to visible Oh and I tried launching from my tiger partition and that didn't show them either
I'll check in tonight before I run terminal commands shown above. I hope this fixes it since I have my entire music, video, pictures folders on those drives

 

[durija]

I never was able to get the fix to work. But here's a strange thing. I plug in my USB flash drive and...nothing. But usually (but not always) if I mount and unmount a disk image or firewire drive, the USB drive appears. Magic!

 

[RaymondLuczak]

My DVD won't unmount!

Hello all:

My DVD (just a DVD I'd borrowed from the library) won't appear on the desktop but appears in the Disk Utility. I cannot unmount no matter what I do.

I have an Intel Mac Pro (2.66 GHz), and as far as I can tell, there's no hole for a flattened paper clip for me to push through in order to get the DVD drive tray to open.

Any tips and suggestions will be *MOST* appreciated.

Thanks again, all.

Sincerely,

Raymond

 

[iMattUK]

Hello all:

My DVD (just a DVD I'd borrowed from the library) won't appear on the desktop but appears in the Disk Utility. I cannot unmount no matter what I do.

Have you tried rebooting? Normally that clears it and you can eject. If you genuinely have a jammed DVD, you genuinely have a problem - you're right, there is no paperclip hole...

 

[iMattUK]

I wonder how they became invisible.... When I get home from work I'll try the terminal commands to change attributes to visible Oh and I tried launching from my tiger partition and that didn't show them either
I'll check in tonight before I run terminal commands shown above. I hope this fixes it since I have my entire music, video, pictures folders on those drives

If you run Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion, that's the likely cause.

Good luck. If you don't get the drives back, try on another computer or another account on the same Mac. If you ever get to see those drives again, do yourself a favour and buy a backup drive and a copy of SuperDuper and make sure you never risk losing stuff you value again

 

[Partron22]

wrong thread