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.

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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.

External hard drive icon won't appear on desktop

Apparently spontaneously (has worked fine in the past!) I cannot get a desktop icon for my La Cie external hard drive to appear. I can see the hard drive in Desktop Utility and can eject it through there but the verify and repair options aren't highlighted.

I hear it spinning- I think?
That may not be so good because it suggests the power is getting to it and it is something else more critical to the functioning of the drive that is wrong. If it is the enclosure you could try moving it out of the enclosure into a different one, or into the computer.
I just used Disk Warrior to rebuild the directory- no luck.
Ah, so did Diskwarrior see the drive? I didn't think you could see the drive in Disk Utility.
I also replaced the firewire Cable- no luck.
Good try but the flashing blue light suggested something else to me.
I'm now doing to bring it to a local Computer Store to try to retrieve the information.
Try using an application such as [Data Rescue II|http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php] or [FileSalvage|http://subrosasoft.com/OSXSoftware/index.php?mainpage=product_info&productsid=1]. Both have free trial versions that let you see if the software will help before you decide to buy. You will also need a second hard drive equal to or larger in size than your first drive.
I wrote to Lacie- but they are so slow in responding- it will be days.
Ummmm....

External hard drive - Everything is gone

Yesterday I purchased a new external hard drive as my old one had been playing up... I managed to transfer some of my files over before the old one went a weird & wouldn't display any of my files.
Now it's showing there's 320gig available, there was 300gig of music on it yesterday morning...
Does this mean I've lost everything? Any way of recovering anything??

I suspect your library has been transformed from the old layout into the new one. See make a split library portable for details. The empty but for artwork folders you're seeing are likely to contain orphaned artwork and .ini files generated at some point by Windows Media Player. iTunes doesn't move these when it shuffles things around. Once you've made sure you can move the artist folders sideways or down into another folder, make sure nothing else has been affected, then remove.
tt2

External Hard Drive icon not working on desktop

My "MAC HD" and an external hard drive I have called "Music" show up on the desktop, but are not clickable.
I cannot move them, open them, or select them in any way.
Also, if I now drop documents onto my desktop, they show up in the finder on my desktop, but not actually on the desktop itself.
Can anyone help ? This happens regularly. My only solution thus far has been to restart.
I don;t want to keep restarting. I would like to know what the problem is and how to solve it permanently.

No. I just checked and it's not there. . .
BTW, Thanks for your quick response!!!!
The circle blue light rings are illuminated on on the front of the Western Digital External but interestingly enough, the inner ring which is usually as bright as the outer ring is dimmer? Not sure what that's indicating. Maybe it's just reflective to the point that it's no connected to the eMac current;y. . .

My hard drive icon has gone from finder. how do i check available space?

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Go to Finder Preferences (in the Finder menu) > General tab, make sure the item "Hard Disks" is checkmarked. Once it is, your hard drive's icon should appear on the desktop in the rightmost column.
You can also maintain a quickly viewable summary. In Finder, go to the View menu and select Show Status Bar. That will add a narrow area at the bottom of each Finder window. In that area will be shown the amount of free space remaining on the drive, as well as the number of items in that folder.

I plugged in my external Hard drive everything was going fine, I dumped lots of music into it. Now I can find the external hard Drive Icon. I have done a search using spotlight and WD My Passport doesn't show up.

Any Idea as to where it went?

What does this have to do with iCloud on your iOS device (i.e. this forum you've posted in)?
Have you tried unplugging and plugging the hard drive back in? Tried turning it off and back on again?

External Hard Drive Icons have disappeared from Desktop

I have 4 external drives, 3 G-Tech and 1 LaCie, I don't have them on permanently and today I switched them on for my usual backups but the icons didn't appear.My finder prefs shows External disks checked and indeed if I check/uncheck Hard disks they switch on and off but external disks there is nothing.
I can see the drives in Disk utility and can open them from there and my backup app "Databackup" can see them and backup files as normal. I've unplugged/plugged all relevant cables, shut down, restarted, verified disks (no problems) all to no avail. I haven't updated any software since I last used them (yesterday) so I'm at a loss.
Does anyone have any clue, I'd be most grateful for any input.
Thanks
Ed

Hello ED
You don't say which of your Mac's the Drives are connected to or if there FireWire / USB?
If there chained FireWire, disconnect them all and try connecting the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th Drive in the chain directly to the Mac/iMac.
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Dennis

External Hard Drive Icon Disappeared/No access

Hi-
I have a Fantom Firewire External HD. I've owned it for almost 3 years. The other day I started my computer and the icon had disappeared and I can no longer access it in OS X. The drive still shows in Disc Utility, but I can't mount it/disc repair/anything. If I reboot to OS9 it boots on there. I've tried Norton Disc Doctor, but it says the computer does not recognize the drive and do I want to initialize, which I don't! Any suggestions on getting it back to OS X?
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Hi Mark, just curious about Norton Disk Doctor and found this about it ..
"Symantec has posted a note saying that the only Norton product compatible with Mac OS 10.4.X (Tiger) is Norton Antivirus 10.0 for the Macintosh. Do not use other Norton products because the results will be at best partially successful and may in fact cause damage to your computer."
I haven't used anything by Norton, so I don't know what damage that would be, however, try removing the program and then Disk Repair afterwards.
Further to the hard disk not being mounted, are you able to try another Mac OS X computer to see if it mounts on that? If so, try re-setting PRAM - (pressing Command-Option-P-R together on starting up and listen for two start-up bongs, then release).
This will, amongst other things, will re-set all connection buses for firewire and USB ports.
Best wishes,
Robert.
Message was edited by: Bob'syourUncle

External hard drive icon has disappeared

I have a 160gb acomdata external on FW. About a week ago the icon for the external disappeared (prior to the icon dropping out everything worked fine). Finder does not display it. If I use DU I can see the drive, get drive info and see the files on the drive, but DU will not let me do first aid on it nor can I mount the drive. What happened?

It's FAT32, here is the profile from system:
HM160HC:
Manufacturer: DMI
Model: 0x550
GUID: 0x1010055011EB12
Maximum Speed: Up to 400 Mb/sec
Connection Speed: Up to 400 Mb/sec
Sub-units:
HM160HC Unit:
Unit Software Version: 0x10483
Unit Spec ID: 0x609E
Firmware Revision: 0x353
Product Revision Level: 3.53
Sub-units:
HM160HC SBP-LUN:
HID Unit:
Unit Software Version: 0x0
Unit Spec ID: 0x1430
When I connect it to my PC laptop same problem the system will not recognize it.

External hard drive icons(fire wire)

I have a lacie external drive hooked up to my G5.I went into disk utility,and when i clicked on the lacie it had a beautiful fire wire icon in orange.All of the icons that came with the lacie are ugly.I checked the lacie website for the icon and it wasnt there.I think it is a apple icon.I cant find it anywhere,If i find something i like i would like to just change my boring little icon.Can anyone help me?

When you find what you want, you can also look in the software section on the Apple site for icons, do this:
1-Highlight the HD and do an apple(command)+i key combination, or right click and scroll down, for 'get info'.
2-Do the same on the icon you have found and like.
3-Go to the icon at the top left of the screen beside the description and click once on it. It should have a glow like selection around it. Do a copy, apple(command)+c key combination.
4-Go to the HD icon you want to replace. Click once on it and it should have the glow selection like before. Do a paste, apple(command)+v, and voila you should have a new HD icon.
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External Hard Drive does not show any of my movies or my music

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I am having the same problem, but on a Mini. Hard drive space is used but my old stuff is gone. I hope someone answers this for us.

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Hi, I've just got the latest iMac. Very excited! I did all the software updates, connected my Western Digital extended hard drive so that I could copy some files over onto my new Mac. It was fine at first. Then when I wanted to open up the external hard drive icon on my desktop again and double clicked on it, everything disappeared from the screen for a few seconds, then reappeared but my external hard drive simply opened the window to my personal hard drive on the Mac. The WD links to my computer via Firewire. I then connected my USB external hard drive stick and it was the same story.
I used Disk Utility to test everything and everything was fine.
I then reinstalled Mac OSX 10.4.8 and plugged in my external hard drives. Everything worked perfectly. After copying over documents and a couple of programs, and downloading a few more programs, I ran my software updates again, upgrading the operating system to Tiger 10.4.9. I attached my external hard drive and it was the same problem all over again.
I the read up the online discussions and also chatted to an Apple dealer, and their advice was to download the Intel Combo and reinstall the operating system. I have just done this and my external hard drives will still not mount properly. Their icons appear on screen but double click them and everything disappears.
Please help. This is really frustrating as I have a backlog of work to do and I seem to be wasting hours on this. Not only that, this is a brand new machine which I rightly expect to work straight away.
I look forward to your response. Thank you in advance.

Hi, try to put your HDD in other Mac and look if appear the same, also you can try to repair permission.

All final cut events, projects disappeared from external hard drive

I had a re-start this morning and the event I was working on lost its purple box and its white star. Can't find the project, can't find the event.
Even more troubling, the Final Cut Events and Library folders on my external hard drive is also gone. Really need some help here. Any ideas?

It almost looks like all of the original media is gone.

?: How do you move files to an external hard drive

Hello everyone,
I have a 2009 MacBook Pro running Lion 10.7.5
I am starting to run out of internal HD space as my images in Photoshop are very large (over 1 GB ea.)
I currently use an external hard drive for Time Machine but would like to use a different external hard drive just to have my photo images on it.
Im assuming that i would purchase another external hard drive formatted for mac, plug it into my MBP and simply drag my image files from my MBP onto the external hard drive icon. After that just delete the images from my MBP HD. Is that all there is to it?
I wasnt sure if there was a step in there where you have to tell your MBP that the new external hard drive is NOT for Time Machine, but is simply to transfer image files onto (?)
Please let me know if this is how it works and how to do this.
best to you all and thanks so much for your help
take care,
rick

Rick,
the “EDIT” note in my last response was an “oh yeah, I should mention this” moment that I’d had after initially responding with my single “yup” sentence. You had mentioned that you were already using Time Machine to back up your internal hard drive to an external hard drive. I’d wanted to clarify that your new external hard disk should not be simultaneously used as a Time Machine backup drive; it should be treated just like your internal hard disk, in that it gets backed up by Time Machine (a “source” drive) rather than receives Time Machine backups (a “destination” drive), which your current external hard drive already does.
As far as my recommendations, I’ve had good results with the Hitachi hard drive series with five-year warranties. I’m currently using a Samsung 840 PRO SSD as my internal disk; so far, so good, but I don’t have long-term experience with it yet. (The 840 PRO has a five-year warranty also. As you can tell, I prefer drives with long warranties.) Since you have a 2009 MacBook Pro, getting your new drive in an external enclosure with a FireWire 800 port (and getting a FireWire 800 cable for it, of course) will allow the best performance when reading from or writing to it. Since it will be holding large images, performance will probably be an important criterion for you.
To set up your new external drive to be backed up by Time Machine, plug it in to your MacBook Pro, open the Time Machine pane in System Preferences, unlock the lock in the lower left corner if it shows a locked padlock, press the “Options…” button in the lower right corner, and make sure that your new external drive is not in the list of drives excluded from being backed up. If it’s not there, then you should be good. If it is there, then you’ll need to select it and press the “-” button to “subtract” it from the list of excluded drives.

My external hard drive icon is gone?

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