Neither hard drives appear on desktop or sidebar or in a save window

My G5 Quad has two hard drives. Tiger is on one and Leopard is on the other. Everything seems to be functioning properly but the drives don't show on the desktop, in the side bars, in the Finder>GO, or in save windows whether I have started up in Leopard or Tiger. They do show up in Disk Utility and I have verified both drives. They also show up in System preferences, Startup Disk. I've also checked that show hard drives is checked in the Finder Preferences. Somewhere I found a buunch of commands to type into Terminal to fix it, but I'm afraid of trying, doing something I don't understand and besides I can't find the article again. Any suggestions?

go to finder, hit command-, (that's "comma"), go to the General tab, select "Hard Drives" tick box under "show these items on the desktop". Try unchecking the box, then control clicking (right click) on finder in the dock and selecting "relaunch". Then check the box again. Then control click on the desktop and select "Clean Up".
Are you using multiple displays?
Go into Displays preferences and change the resolution of your screen to something else... it may be that the icon just got "off the screen" somehow.
For a finder window sidebar:
open a new finder window.
while holding down the command key, click on the "Title" of the folder you are currently viewing. For example if I'm looking at my "Home" folder, I would click where it gives my user name (while holding command of course). Select the item ALL the way at the BOTTOM of the list (it should read the name of your computer, possibly "Bilbo's PowerMac G5", or some such.
:You should see a list of all the drives, optical media, and network volumes on your computer. Drag the icon of the Hard Drives you want +in the+ sidebar *to the* sidebar from the main/viewing portion of the window.
Hope this is what you were asking for...
Message was edited by: 1984-IWas1
Message was edited by: 1984-IWas1

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Hi.
I recently bought a 17' macbook pro 2.6. I previously had a g4 with four hard drives in it, so I took a couple of them out and put them in external cases. I also have a few external hard drives that were always externals (never in the g4).
The problem I have is that I cannot access one of the formerly internal hard drives. It appears in disk utility and I verified it and there was a minor repair needed (I forget what), so I used the repair function and nothing has changed. The drive icon appears on the desktop, but not under "devices" in the finder window. When I double click on the drive on the desktop, any open finder windows disappear for a few seconds, then reappear, but the drive does not open.
The same thing happens about half of the time with another external drive that was always an external drive. The strange thing is that, even if I can't open the drive, iTunes can access the music files and library on that drive. These drives work fine on my wife's macbook (2.16, running 10.4).
And as if that weren't strange enough, about half of the times that I select "documents" from the "places" menu in the finder window, the same thing happens (finder windows disappear for a few seconds and the documents folder doesn't open), yet I can access my documents folder through my home folder.
The other drive I pulled from my g4 is currently my time machine drive and has no similar problems. Two other external drives also have no problems.
Does this ring any bells?
Thanks,
Bruce

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I'm not sure why it seems that Apple wants to "simplify" things to a point that the results can become unfamiliar to the typical Mac user, like myself.
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Francine
Francine
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