Problem: a friend called me in a panic and said his hard drive was missing, but the computer was functioning. He said he could boot the computer fine, access his dock to open applications and that all his folders were on his desktop except his hard drive icon. The first thing he went and done was run OnyX maintenance. When that didn't work, he booted from his system CD, ran Disk First Aid and repair permissions. That didn't help, so he got desperate and ran DiskWarrior. Still no hard drive showing up, so at this point, he called me.

Solution: The first thing I had my friend do was to login to his "Test" User account. Bingo! The hard drive was back! So what did this tell me? The problem was more than likely isolated locally to his main User Library. Next, I had him drag his preferences folder in his main User Library to the desktop and log back into that main account. Why his preferences folder? Because, as I stated last week, corrupt preferences can still be a common problem in OS X as in pre-OS X and is a logical place to start. When he logged back in to his main User account, his hard drive icon was back! So now I know he has a corrupt preference file in his main User Library. But which one? He has over 500 preference files in his preference folder! Next, I had him open the newly created preference folder (Figure 1) in his main User Library and look at the files in there. There were only 15 files and the hard drive was showing up fine, so it more that likely had to be one of those preference files causing the problem.

Looking at all the files, the com.apple.finder.plist preference file seem to be the most logical file associated with the desktop and hard drive icon, so I had him trash that file out of his main User preference folder sitting on his desktop. Next, I had him trash the newly created preference folder in his main User Library and then drag the original preference folder on his desktop back into the main User Library and reboot. Bingo! It worked! The hard drive icon was back! Now all he had to do is reset his Finder preferences and everything was back to normal. Problem was solved!

As you can see in this example, once you isolate the problem to one of your Libraries, it's basically a process of elimination from there.

Next week we solve a MacOSG member's sleep problem, so stay tuned!

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