Invisible Startup Disk Icon on Desktop and Finder

Question

Today suddenly I found that my Startup disk icon was gone from the desktop and from the Finder. I did some searching and found the following solution that may be useful for someone else:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=4932292#post4932292
I pasted the solution below:
from a Terminal window, type:
ls -lOd /
(That's lowercase ell, lowercase ess, space, minus, lowercase ell, capital oh, lowercase dee, space, forward slash)
You should get something like this:
hostname:~ username$ ls -lOd /
drwxrwxr-t 32 root admin - 1156 Feb 8 20:35 /
Sounds like you might see something like this instead:
hostname:~ username$ ls -lOd /
drwxrwxr-t@ 32 root admin hidden 1156 Feb 8 20:35 /
(note it says "hidden" instead of "-")
To fix this, type:
sudo chflags nohidden /
and provide your admin password. You won't get any output back from the command but the icon should now appear on your desktop, and the hidden flag should go away if you repeat the 'ls -lOd /' command.
And just in case you missed it above, you've got to be sure Hard disks are turned on in Finder General Preferences under "Show these items on the Desktop"

Answer 1

A few days after trying the solution in my previous post, I realized that the Startup disk icon was still missing from Devices in the Finder's sidebar.
So, following some advice from other forums, I went and deleted com.apple.finder.plist and com.apple.sidebarlists.plist from homedirectory/library/preferences. Then did a control-option-click on Finder in the Dock and chose "relaunch".
So this completed the fix. Coincidentally this also fixed a "freeze" issue that I was having.