Boot Drive icon gone?

I can run apps and get to docs from the drive, but it has no icon and in the windows I do not have the option to select it?
I am so freaking out right now - I am afraid to reboot.
Should I run disc repair - I see the drive there.
I am just totally freaked out to do anything.
Please help
Thanks
KB

there is no icon on the desktop or in the sidebar. I have tried the preferences - they are set to show the hard drive. In disk utility - it shows the drive it is fine - i ran a verify test and all is well with the drive.
I came across something about running an apple script to tell the drive to show itself. however - i cannot find an application to run the apple script.
where on my computer should there be an apple script editor? or where can i download one.
thanks for any help

Similar Messages

How to position boot drive icon to top right on clone

Under 10.4 my boot drive icon always appeared at the top right. This is particularly useful when I boot from a clone, so that I do not carelessly do something believing that I have booted from my main drive. Under Leopard, however, the boot drive icon does NOT appear in the upper right when I boot from my clones. Rather, the icon of the main drive stays there. Any way to restore this Tiger capability? I know that I can manually place the icon on each clone, but that defeats the purpose, since it reverts with each new cloning. Thanks!

I don't have two Leopard drives at the moment, though I have Leopard installed on the main partition of my internal hard drive, with Tiger installed on a smaller partition. Currently, when running Leopard, the Leopard drive is in the upper right, with the Tiger "drive" below it. If I manually move these icons so the Tiger "drive" is in the upper right, and if I then right-click the desktop and select Arrange By ->Kind, the icons revert to the Leopard drive being in the upper right. Would arranging your desktop icons by "Kind" give you what you are looking for?
Ken

Boot drive icon as disspeared!

Hi guys,
My boot drive icon has disappeared from the desktop. The Mac boots up fine but its hard drive icon can't be found anywhere!
Any ideas how to restore it or where it went? I repaired permissions from the Leopard install disc and the boot drive but nothing
Thanks
B

I don't have tiger/diskwarrier. what am I suppose to do?
do you mean leopard is destroying directories? Maybe that's why I'm getting all these recovered files in the garbage can. what am I suppose to do with that? how am I suppose to get back my internal hard drive icons?
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Hard Drive icon gone to lines on Desktop

In the last hour my Macintosh Hard Drive icon on the desktop has gone to a series of lines under the picture of the HD. I've restarted a few times just to see if it was a small glitch but its still the same. Does anyone know how to bring the wrods "macintosh hard drive" back to life ? I've only had this a few days and already getting problems.
Paul.

You can go clean all of them, including font cache. Restart your computer about 3 or 4 times after it. The first reboot will take awhile, as the cache files are being rebuilt.
-Bmer
Mac Owners Support Group
Join Us @ MacOSG.com
ITMS: MacOSG Podcast
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Disc drive icon gone.

One of the new Mac books we have at work has no iDisc icon on the desk top.
One of the guys told us he trashed it thinking it had something to do with
an HD (high Def) drive and he did not want that?????? :-p
The computer now does not display alot of on screen things like, loaded discs, programs and so on.
The computer does work but how can I get this back??
Please help.
thank you for any help.
Cam

Click on the desktop to get to finder, then check it's preferences in the General tab. Is "Connected servers" checked?

My external hard drive icon is gone?

my external hard drive icon is gone?

Ferd II,
I'm having the same problem as Michael in Canada. I'm using a LaCie 320GB hard drive to backup my MacBook Pro via Firewire cable about once a week. Today when I plugged in the hard drive, no icon appeared. Disk Utility shows the external drive and Verify and Repair confirm it's OK. I checked System Preferences and Finder Preferences and the icon should appear. I've done a Restart and Shutdown, with the external drive unplugged and plugged in, with no success. I've looked at the possibility of resetting SMC and PRAM (from another similar post) but after reading those suggestions, I'm not seeing the symptoms that should correct. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Changing Windows drive icon in boot loader

Hi. I found this guide on how to change the windows drive icon in boot loader. I followed the steps but when i want to copy the ._ICON file, there is no such file on the list and Terminal won't let me copy it.
When i go to the /Volumes/ directry and type "ls -la" i get the list:
drwxrwxrwt@ 5 root admin 170 Jan 31 17:40 .
drwxrwxr-t@ 37 root admin 1326 Jan 31 16:43 ..
drwxrwxrwx@ 1 differenxe staff 16384 Jan 31 17:23 ICON (this is the USB drive with changed icon)
drwxr-xr-x 1 differenxe staff 4096 Jan 31 2009 Untitled (this is the Windows drive)
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root admin 1 Jan 31 2009 Mac -> /
Apparently there is no ._ICON file. What should i do?
Message was edited by: differenxe

Oops, i forgot to add the link to the guide. So here it is: http://wiki.onmac.net/index.php/Personalizeyourbootloader

Hi, never used support before - here goes! My Mac G4 MDD no longer shows the start up hard drive icon. The one with all my files on! It shows the other 3 hard drive icons and boots up OK. Has my start up hard drive failed? Can it be fixed? Thanks.

Hi, never used support before - here goes!
My Mac G4 MDD no longer shows the start up hard drive icon. The one with all my files on!
It shows the other 3 hard drive icons and boots up OK.
Has my start up hard drive failed? Can it be fixed?
Thanks.
Machine Name: Power Mac G4
Machine Model: PowerMac3,6
CPU Type: PowerPC G4 (3.2)
Number Of CPUs: 2
CPU Speed: 1.25 GHz
L2 Cache (per CPU): 256 KB
L3 Cache (per CPU): 1 MB
Memory: 2 GB
Bus Speed: 167 MHz
Boot ROM Version: 4.5.7f1

Doesn't sound like any hard drive failure to me - more a Finder preference.
Finder -> Preferences -> General -> Show these items on the desktop -> Hard disks
The startup disk is sometimes treated differently from other disks (such as external and network disks) and I'm guessing this is a simple preference setting, although I might be wrong.

Hard drive icon during boot up

not sure what the problem is but when i boot up my macbook pro. sometimes i get a hard drive icon and it's labeled as my main drive inside the laptop but i have to click on the button to continue booting up. any ideas what could be causing this? it happens both when my external drives are connected and not connected.. lately its been happening more often.

Hi,
Navigate here....
Black Apple > System Preferences > System > Start up Disk.
From there you can choose which drive the computer will boot from. Select your own, internal, hard drive. Job done.
Regards.
Ian.
Note to self - Must learn to type faster than V.K.
Message was edited by a man in a dark suit, wearing sun glasses.

My hard drive icon is gone from desk top and does not show up in spotlight or finder searches!

Hi there
recently my hard drive icon has disappeared from my Macbook Pro (10.7.4) desk top and does not show up in spotlight or finder searches! I have tried several fixes posted online for earlier operating systems with no luck.
Also, when I connect my external hard drive the icon does not appear on the desl top nor in the finder either, making looking for documents impossible.
Help!!!
Thanks in advance!
Marni

In "finder" click "finder" then "preferences" and navigate to the "general" tab.
Select which items you would like to have show on your desktop.

Q: Restore Boot Drive from Backup?

I've used Retrospect for years with good results. On several occasions, I've needed to restore my boot drive from backup, and it worked flawlessly.
Not this time.
After the restore I can boot okay from the restored volume.
What's weird is that many of my preferences are gone! My dock has reverted to default (all icons I'd added are missing). When I view my "Account" in the System Preferences, my "Picture" is still there, but my Login Items are gone!
It would be easy enough to manually reconfigure these things. BUT this makes me wonder what else isn't being properly restored, that I may not stumble across for weeks, only to find that I've recycled my backup and can't do anything about it?
Thanks in advance for your thoughts.
-- Jim

You're welcome. As to your questions, by the numbers:
1. I don't know. I wasn't there to watch you perform either the Backup or the Restore. As I said earlier, and as confirmed by the responses received on the Retrospect forums, you went about the Restore by a convoluted method. I suggest you review the information concerning Restore in the Retrospect Users Guide.
2. Again, beats me. How would I know? I've never seen this problem, nor had the other Retrospect experts who responded to your post on the Retrospect forums. Technically, if you used Restore to "Restore an entire disk" then everything should have been restored from the Backup Set so that the restored disk reflected its state as of the last Backup.
Don't take this the wrong way, but you've been a bit "light" on details both here and in the Retrospect forums. It's impossible to perform a forensic analysis based on the limited details provided. If you try to jog your memory this long after the event, your recall may be imperfect. In your Retrospect forums post, you noted the possibility of "Probably an operator headspace malfunction."which I found amusing, but is often the case in trying to recreate what one did. Next time, take step-by-step notes.
If I had to guess, it was something in the process you used, i.e. the first failed Restore attempt from using the incorrect option, followed by the second correct attempt using "Restore an entire disk." You may have done things between those two attempts that led to the issue. WIthout a record, it's impossible to reconstruct the events other than based on potentially imperfect recall.
I generally recommend checking backups after they're performed. This is easily done with bootable Duplicates, since you can start up from them, look around, try a few applications. Since Backup Sets are not bootable, one cannot check them in this way. I recommend using a Safe Boot from the backup since, if you have Mail as a Login Item and new mail was received since you initiated the backup, then the new mail would be downloaded to the backup, which you'd probably like to avoid.
Using Retrospect's Verification option is also helpful. It increases the time required to perform a backup, since afterwards the destination files are compared against the source files, but it can let you know about problems, if any. Verification does yield some false positives (Execution Errors) on cache and log files (generally date/time or size issues), but these can be ignored for such files if you're performing a "hot backup" — backing up your startup disk while booted from such — as cache and log files on your startup disk are constantly being updated. The differences in such files are irrelevant w.r.t. the integrity of the backup. One can avoid these false positives by performing a cold backup: running Retrospect from another bootable volume, e.g. booting from a Duplicate of your startup disk to then backup your normal startup disk to another volume. In a cold backup, your normal startup disk hasn't been used as the startup disk, hence cache and log files on such aren't updated. Any execution errors you see then are worth examining in the Retrospect Log.
What I suggest you do is the following:
• Let sleeping dogs lie. Keep the Backup Set from which you restored the drive around for awhile in case something else turns up missing in the next couple of months, specifically personal data. Create a new Backup Set for future backups of the disk in question. Consider implementing bootable Duplicates in addition to Backup Sets.
• If the OS becomes problematic, perform an Archive and Install. For important tips on this, see my "General advice on performing an Archive and Install" FAQ.
• If any third-party apps become problematic, uninstall them, then reinstall them.
• If you're regularly having to restore your startup disk due to "corruption" there may be something amiss with the disk. Keep an eye on its SMART status by checking such in Disk Utility. For one approach to this with step-by-step instructions, see Steps 1 and 2 of the Procedure specified in my "Resolving Disk, Permission, and Cache Corruption" FAQ.
Finally, you wrote: "P.S. - Apologies if this bothers anyone, but I plan to cross-post this to the Retrospect forum, since it appears to get a somewhat different set of users."It doesn't necessarily bother me, but cross-posting to a variety of different forums or Discussions is generally considered "very bad form" as one risks wasting some subset of responders' time. It's a "newbie" mistake and one does not want to gain a reputation for using the "shotgun" method.
Cross-posting is very annoying when one spend one's time answering a question in one place, only to find the same question posted by the same person on another forum and also answered there: one of the responders who answered the question in that exchange had their time wasted. Think how you would feel in the same situation.
When I found your post on the Retrospect forums (which is where the question really belongs) I almost skipped answering your question here for that very reason.
I think we're done here.
Good luck!
Dr. Smoke
Author: Troubleshooting Mac® OS X
Note: The information provided in the link(s) above is freely available. However, because I own The X Lab™, a commercial Web site to which some of these links point, the Apple Discussions Terms of Use require I include the following disclosure statement with this post:
I may receive some form of compensation, financial or otherwise, from my recommendation or link.

Hard Drive icon won't open and menu bar flashes off and on

All of a sudden, in the middle of the day, my eMac went haywire. I can launch apps and docs are one the desktop. But I cannot open the Hard Drive icon. If I double-click on it (or used Command-O from keyboard), the icon won't open. And when I attempt to open it, the Finder Menu Bar begins flashing off and on (vanishing, reappearing, vanishing) across the top of the screen. I haver rebooted, run disk utility to repair permissions, even booted from TechTools to run its diagnostics. But still no access to the Hard Drive icon. I logged out and logged in as a TEST user, and same thing happens even when logged in that way. Literally, this happened in an instant. One minute the eMac was fine, then this started. Anyone else seen this? -- david

If the problem exists in both your regular account and your Test account odds are that it is at the system level. You can try a Safe boot (hold down the shift key at startup) to see if there is a third party startup item or one of the optional Apple functions that is causing the problem. You could also boot from the installer disk and use the Disk Utility->Repair Disk function. If you have a utility such as Tiger Cache Cleaner which will do a deep cache clean you can also try that.
Francine
Schwieder

How do I Partition Yosemite Boot Drive Using BCA?

I replaced the HD in my Mid 2010 27" IMac to achieve greater storage. The replacement went fine with no issues, and I then installed Yosemite (10.10.1) from scratch using the latest version of Diskmaker and installing the install version of Yosemite on to a USB thumb drive. The replacement drive is a 4.0Gb drive with no prior installations on it.
Everything has gone fine, and OSX Yosemite seemingly works great.
But I need to install Boot Camp and a fresh version of Windows 7, 64bit SP1, and it just won't work at the partition step before I ever get to the Windows installation.
When I use BCA I downloaded the drivers without a hitch, but when I go to the next step I encounter the error message, "The startup disk cannot be partitioned or restored to a single partition. The startup disk must be formatted as a single Mac OS extended volume or already partitioned by Boot camp Assistant for installing Windows".
I have found a number of references to this error message, but none seem to describe my situation with a new, clean, install of Mavericks.
I have a bootable backup (via Carbon Copy Cloner), and have loaded current Yosemite compatible versions of Partition Magic and TechTools onto the external bootable drive, but cannot see any problems with the drive.
Before I progress any further with installing apps on to the new drive and I still have a clean Yosemite installation on the new HD, I want to resolve the issue since Windows 7 via Boot Camp (and not via virtual software!) is essential. The prior smaller HD had a Windows 7 Boot Camp installation that worked fine.
Options that might work:
1. Boot to the external drive, and create an MS-DOS partition manually using Disk Utilities, and then try to use that partition for Windows using BCA.
2. Use low level partitioning software or terminal mode to erase the small hidden OSX restore partition, which may be why BCA thinks I have more than one partition on the boot drive. This notion shows up in some of the threads on this web site, but why would Apple allow this problem since all installations of Yosemite presumably have the hidden restore partition?
3. My new 4Gb hard drive is a hybrid SSD/HD (ST4000DX001), but this type of drive seems to be the norm now, and I do not see where this would be a problem.
4. Erase the new drive, and install a clean version of the original OSX, (Lion, I believe for the mid 2010 27" IMac) using the internet and the Cmd-R command, subsequently updating the original OSX version to Yosemite after creating a Boot Camp partition (although I don't know if BCA would work from the original version of OSX for this machine. I really don't want to do this because of the time required for the internet download, but it would take me to the original OSX image which came with the machine.
I have no issues with my Yosemite installation, and backup is not a problem since my goal was to create a clean installation of OSX uncluttered with legacy apps.
I would be grateful for any experienced suggestions, or hypotheses as to the nature of the problem.
Thanks!!!!

You can use an external disk for store files and for Time Machine, but you have to create a second volume.
To create volumes on the external disk, use Disk Utility. See > http://pondini.org/OSX/DU3.html I recommend you to put as much space as you can for the Time Machine volume, because backups consume a lot and Time Machine starts deleting backups when the external disk is full

Boot drive no longer moves to the top?

I just noticed that when I switch no another start up disk (CCC clone on external FW drive), that the active system HD icon no longer displays itself on the top right side on the desktop. It just stays were it was.
Why would it no longer move to the top? I got confused the other day and almost tossed a bunch of important files that I thought were on the active system drive...
Hope it's just a 10.5.6 bug that will get fixed in the next update.
Anyone else notice this?
Dan-

It's a bug that occurs if you update a bootable volume via Software Update or a backup/cloning app. It's been filed. Boot into each bootable volume, move the boot volume icon to the top, and it should stay there during subsequent reboots.

No hard drive icon on brand new iMac?

Hi,
I just received, installed and set up a Refurbished 24 in Intel iMac, 3.06 GHz.
All is fine, except that the hard drive icon (by default named "Macintosh HD) does not show up at all on my desktop. The desktop is totally empty, no icon at all. All apllications are there, system is there... the computer works fine.
I tried: dik utility verification and repair (where it does show) - logging in and off - restarting the computer, etc., to no avail. NO hard drive icon showing.
I can access the drive content via the Go menu, but this is not normal, and it is awkward and inconvenient.
Any solution?
Thanks,

Hi Joe,
Thanks! I had already figured that out from the forum, but after posting, and after erasing and reinstalling the whole Snow Leopard!!!! Waste of time and stupid overlook on my side, specially since I had just gone through all system preferences setup and forgot the Finder one.
Well, at least I could partition my hard drive as I wanted...
Serpamac

Boot Drive icon gone?

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