MacOS – Can’t see a specific external hard drive

external-diskhard drivemacosntfs

I was trying to make an NTFS hard drive writable on my macbook. I tried the way mentioned in this link: https://www.maketecheasier.com/write-ntfs-partition-os-x-yosemite/

Now I can make changes on my hard drive. But there is another problem. After unmounting – mounting the hard drive, now I can see it only in Volumes folder. I can't bring it back to sidebar or desktop.

I tried other hard drives, they work normally.

Thanks in advance!

Note: I have 10.10.4 installed.

Best Answer

This is expected behavior. You specifically told it to not show up in your fstab file, with the "nobrowse" parameter. If you want it on the desktop to have a quick shortcut to it, create a symlink.

ln -s /Volumes/VOLUME_NAME ~/Desktop/VOLUME_NAME

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External drive mounts but doesn’t appear in Finder anymore

With the help of Drobo's technical support who pointed me to this MacRumors thread, I've resolved the issue. It turned out that somehow my drive got set to "invisible", which is a filesystem attribute. I don't think this setting is settable via the Finder, so I'm not sure how it got set like that.

To confirm the issue, I had to install Xcode and then install the command line tools, then run this Terminal command:

GetFileInfo /Volumes/Drobo/

where /Volumes/Drobo/ is the path to the volume in question. This command returns all the attributes set for that volume. If the list of attributes includes a V (capital V), it means that the volume is invisible.

To fix it:

SetFile -a v /Volumes/Drobo/

with a lowercase v, to remove the invisible attribute.

After a reboot, everything was back to normal.

Note: depending on the drive and your permissions, it's possible you will need to run these commands with sudo, although I didn't.

Simulate how a volume is mounted using diskarbitrationd

You hook into diskarbitrationd by using Apple's Disk Arbitration framework. Basically you call DASessionCreate() to create a DASessionRef, and then register one or more notification callbacks.

You would need to register for the DARegisterDiskMountApprovalCallback. This gives you a notification whenever diskarbitrationd is going to mount something new. By returning a DADissenterRef from this callback, you can prevent diskarbitrationd from actually mounting the file system.

Then you can mount the file system yourself and create shortcuts etc. using standard methods, such as the mount() system call.

Here's a direct link to the page in the programming guide, you'll need to examine:

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/DriversKernelHardware/Conceptual/DiskArbitrationProgGuide/ArbitrationBasics/ArbitrationBasics.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40009310-CH2-SW1

Best Answer

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External drive mounts but doesn’t appear in Finder anymore

Simulate how a volume is mounted using diskarbitrationd

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