Sidebar item not found

[pubwvj]

I dragged some folders into the sidebar in the Finder so that I can quickly get to them. At some point a couple of them, not all, stopped working. Now when I click on them I get the message:

The alias "X" could not be opened, because the original item can not be found.

Now aside from the grammatical incorrectness of this sentence it puzzles me because the original item is right where it has always been.

I have not moved the original.
I have not renamed the original.
I have not deleted the original.
I have not done a restore.
I have not ejected the disk.
I have done a restart and a full shutdown.
I have rebuilt permissions.
I can open the original item by going into its parent folder and opening it.

But that isn't strange enough, if I delete the alias from the sidebar and do a restart then poof, it is back there in the sidebar and still doesn't work.

If I delete the alias from the sidebar and put a new copy of it into the sidebar it works fine... until I restart then it goes right back to not working.

Any ideas on what is the cause of:
1) the Finder not finding it
2) the Finder recreating the alias in the sidebar after each restart.

 

[wrldwzrd89]

I dragged some folders into the sidebar in the Finder so that I can quickly get to them. At some point a couple of them, not all, stopped working. Now when I click on them I get the message:

The alias "X" could not be opened, because the original item can not be found.

Now aside from the grammatical incorrectness of this sentence it puzzles me because the original item is right where it has always been.

I have not moved the original.
I have not renamed the original.
I have not deleted the original.
I have not done a restore.
I have not ejected the disk.
I have done a restart and a full shutdown.
I have rebuilt permissions.
I can open the original item by going into its parent folder and opening it.

But that isn't strange enough, if I delete the alias from the sidebar and do a restart then poof, it is back there in the sidebar and still doesn't work.

If I delete the alias from the sidebar and put a new copy of it into the sidebar it works fine... until I restart then it goes right back to not working.

Any ideas on what is the cause of:
1) the Finder not finding it
2) the Finder recreating the alias in the sidebar after each restart.

This sounds like a corrupt preference file. Try moving/deleting ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.sidebarlists.plist and see if it works normally again.

 

[pubwvj]

This sounds like a corrupt preference file. Try moving/deleting ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.sidebarlists.plist and see if it works normally again.

Thanks for the idea. I came to the same conclusion but instead of deleting it I opened it in BBEdit, deleted the offending dict definitions and saved. I then did a restart and it is working fine now. One clue was this was only happening in one of the user accounts so I looked in that user's Library for the prefs plist.

Cheers,

-Walter
in Vermont