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David Lee · Feb 25, 2008, 08:32 AM

I have a Quicksilver 867 running 10.5.2 with all lastest updates installed. Everything was fine this morning and I have been quite impressed with Leopard. Then I came home from work and started up, Whoa! no desktop!

It is gone, run away or lost - np HDs displayed or any of the five aliases I have,

(2 120GB Hitachi HDSs installed, PCI ACARD 133) nothing. The menu bar displays correctly, as does the dock, but not having access to my disks, first time ever this has happened.
Any ides where to start troubleshooting, or should I fire up TM and go back a day?

Big Mac · Feb 25, 2008, 08:59 AM

Are they just invisible? Do applications in your Dock work properly? Do you mean you actually can't see any drives?

David Lee · Feb 25, 2008, 09:05 AM

That's right, I can't see the disks, they may well indeed be invisible. I know they are there, TM seems to work, as do other apps, but the finder is useless. Quiting and restarting it does nothing. I have a Firewire startup disk so I could start up from that ('iger 10.4.11) but then what?

cms · Feb 25, 2008, 09:10 AM

Sounds like your Finder is not running. I'm willing to bet there is no little blue "on" indicator under the Finder icon in the dock. This is due to unrecoverable corruption somewhere in your system. I have seen this in Tiger and in Panther but not (yet) in Leopard. A wipe and reinstall is your best option....

David Lee · Feb 25, 2008, 09:15 AM

Thanks, will try an "aechive and install" first. Post later on the results.

David Lee · Feb 25, 2008, 09:49 AM

OK I tried an "archive and Install" and the hard drives still do not show up. I do get a new finder window from the pull down menu, so I can access stuff. Running the Combo updater now, but I suspect you are right about having to do a wipe and install, what a pain. It takes hours to copy everything back!
More status reports later.

David Lee · Feb 25, 2008, 10:21 AM

Updated via the combo updater 10.5.2 and still no HD shown on the desktop. The finder is running and will open a new window, giving me access to everything. Any ideas what to try?

David Lee · Feb 25, 2008, 10:25 AM

I seem to have solved this. Opened TinkerTool, clicked on disable desktop features, relaunched the finder and then did the reverse unclicking the disable the desktop feature item, and after relaunching the finder, the HDs are now visible. Very strange.
What set that off? I will now have to do some minor updates and backup again.
Whew.....

Big Mac · Feb 25, 2008, 11:38 AM

Invisibility flag got set somehow. Did you use any odd utilities?

tkmd · Feb 25, 2008, 12:13 PM

I have had a similar problem with the finder (10.5.2) both on my MP and my pb. The desktop doesn't disappear - rather I cannot click on any of the icons on my desktop (the dock is OK) . The solution is to relaunch the finder. I have no idea why this happens and seems to unrelated to any one task.

Andrew Stephens · Feb 27, 2008, 03:49 PM

mine does this all the time. Often I wake from sleep to find an empty desktop. Can open new finder windows (cmd n) but need to restart finder to get my icons back. Less so under 10.5.2 but still sometimes.