RSS

The Case of the Missing Boot Drive.

Mon, Feb 11, 2008

Adv. Tips

    By: Joshua Schnell

So, if their is some messed up thing that can happen on a Mac, chances are that it has happened to me. I ask my friends for fixes, but they look at me dumbfounded, and have no idea who I messed up an operating system that’s virtually idiot proof. Well, in the good words of a famous trailer park girl….”oops, I did it again”. Last night I spent three hours on a ride back from visiting family, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to clean up my desktop.

Long story short, upon uninstalling some applications that I never use my Mac HD drive disappeared off my desktop. It was grayed out in the finder and the disk utility. Somehow I managed to mess it up. I tried the usually things, repairing permissions with the disk utility to return my hard drive to my desktop, but nothing would work. So, I did some research tonight and came across a tip that essentially makes folders and files invisible or visible depending on the switch used. I thought I’d give it a go, because at this point, I was ready to do a fresh install anyway.

So, I used SetFile in the terminal to try and make my drive visible.

/Developer/Tools/SetFile -a v /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/

Turns out, it worked just fine…  Essentially SetFile with the “-a” lets you change the attributes of the file and the “v” makes a folder visible.  Worked like a million bucks.  If you want to get more info on SetFile you can type “man SetFile in the terminal.

Share and Enjoy:
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Reddit
  • StumbleUpon
  • Technorati
  • TwitThis
  • Google
  • Mixx
  • NewsVine
  • Propeller

Related Posts

, , , , , , ,

This post was written by:

Joshua Schnell - who has written 336 posts on Macgasm.

Well, I'm pretty much addicted to all things Apple, and Twitter. That's probably all you really need to know. If I'm not posting here, I'm probably wasting time on Twitter.

Contact the author

Viewing 1 Comment

 

Trackbacks

(Trackback URL)

close Reblog this comment
blog comments powered by Disqus