Macgasm

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.

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