On Aug 14, 2005, at 11:17 AM, Green, Cathy wrote: > Greetings all, > > Since I've maxed out the hard drive of my iMac (G3) desktop running > Jaguag (10.2.8), I hooked up a new 160 GB external drive. I > dragged most of the space-hogging stuff to it, but the problem is: > occasionally, the icon doesn't appear on the desktop & doing a > file>find doesn't locate it. So I have to turn off the external & > then back on, which usually does the trick; only a handful of times > have I had to restart the whole thing to get it to appear...This > makes me a bit nervous, since the only copy of my music files & > such is on the external drive. I don't want to back up the files > to my laptop, as that space is getting limited, etc....Is there > something I need to set/reset to avoid this from causing future > concern/potentially more serious issues? > > TIA, > Cathy >
Cathy, I assume this is a USB device? The next time it does not appear I would first use Apple System Profiler (in your utilities folder) to check and see if the computer sees the device. You can see what's attached to your computer there. If Apple System Profiler (Later just called System Profiler but same app) sees it, then it sounds like a FInder issue. If Apple System Profiler does not see it, then it may be a drive issue. When you start your Mac, it looks over all the busses to see if there is anything to mount. If an unmount occurs without you doing it, it may also show up in the system.log. You can open the system.log using the Console application inside the Utilities folder. The system.log's path is /var/log/system.log Once you open it, look for the name of your drive and see what the line says about it. Happy hunting! Schoun | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be August 25. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. | List posting address: <mailto:macgroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu> | List Web page: <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>
