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Missing internal drive icon
Yesterday I performed a complete wipe using disk utilities of the internal drive on my MBP. I reinstalled SL, along with other programs. Things went smoothly, for the most part; only lost half of my hair due to the stress.
However, when I restarted there was no icon for the internal drive. How come? How do I get it back?
I’m planning on performing similar operations on my MP (mid-2010) but don’t know if I have enough hair for that. I use that one the most and have it connected to externals, one of which is for time machine. It now has Lion installed. Been having problems using some of my programs, mainly, FCS 2. I read that going back to SL would fix this but when I load the SL disk it won’t work.
On the MBP I loaded the disk, then wiped the internal and reinstalled with SL. So far FCS 2 works on it. On the MP I have two other older internals, one of which I would like to put SL and keep Lion on the main drive as I like some of its features. This means I could put FCS 2 on the SL drive and others on the main one.
It all sounds logical to me but, with falling hair, I’m not too sure how to go making it happen. Also don’t want to loose all the drive icons plus important ‘stuff’ by duplicating my efforts from the MBP (wasn’t anything on it that I hadn’t already saved). Thanks for your input(s) and advise me of what I neglected to add in the above description…
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11 Replies
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hello…
if i’m following you correctly, you should be able to put that icon back on the desktop under finder > preferences…
if not, then let us know more!
sitruc
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hello…
you had a lot going on in there and i wasn’t sure what was done vs what you wanted to do. i take it you want to run snow leopard and mountain lion on the same box? you can do that and change your startup hd whenever you want to boot into one or the other, or you could run one virtually using parallels or vmware…
is that the goal?
sitruc
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or you could run one virtually using parallels or vmware…? I’m out of the loop on this one…
Think you got my gist. Just not sure how to proceed without having to have heart massage handy while doing it…
One (320gb) internal drive has SL, one (1tb) has Lion. Or, maybe it should be the other way around since videos take up so much more room???
Thanks again for your replies.
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[John Nelson] “One (320gb) internal drive has SL, one (1tb) has Lion. Or, maybe it should be the other way around since videos take up so much more room???”
Does this mean you are using your system drives as your media drives as well? If so, that’s not a good thing. You should always put your media on a separate drive (7200 rpm) with a fast connection (e-data, or FW800).
HTH
Gary
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hello…
[John Nelson] ” or you could run one virtually using parallels or vmware…? I’m out of the loop on this one…”
running an os virtually means it is contained in a separate container on your machine – essentially a single file that contains the entire os install is created, and you run it via one of these pieces of software. for example, with virtual box (https://www.virtualbox.org/), i run windows 7 on my mac in a virtual container.
you don’t want to be doing heavy lifting in a virtual install (things like rendering giant after effects projects, etc.), but otherwise they are very powerful. and the nice thing is that you can run the virtual os right alongside the main one and switch back and forth as needed (as i do with my windows install on my mac – i just have it on a different space and one key stroke and i can switch between them).
your other option is to isolate the operating systems to separate drives (as you were thinking of doing) and then do the “change the startup disk” routine in preferences each time you want to switch between them. of course then you can’t have both running at the same time, though.
as for which one on which drive – the one that you anticipate taking up more space in the long run is the one that should get the bigger drive. although again with a virtual os, you just say up front how big you want it to be, and then it takes up that much space on a drive. so if you put snow leopard on the smaller drive and did a virtual install of mountain lion that was 750gb on the larger drive, you’d have that spare 250gb to use for snow lion.
here’s a quick answer to this same question that has some links to the different options:
https://www.macworld.com/article/2014336/one-mac-two-versions-of-os-x.html
if you don’t need a ton of heavy lifting in mountain lion, i’d recommend considering a virtual install of it…otherwise, you can do the os-per-harddrive option and it should work pretty well too…
hope that helps! feel free to reply with any other questions, of course…
sitruc
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Gary, sorry for not getting back with you sooner. I should have mentioned I do have external drives, three of them. They are used for media storage as well as time machine backup.
The smaller internal drive is still blank and the larger still has lion.
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“your other option is to isolate the operating systems to separate drives (as you were thinking of doing) and then do the “change the startup disk” routine in preferences each time you want to switch between them. of course then you can’t have both running at the same time, though.”
This is what I would like to do. The small internal drive has been erased and is ready, I think, to have the os installed. The problem I have run into is getting the os installed. When I put the SL disk in the main/large drive contains Lion and doesn’t allow the installation of older programs. I realize there must be a quick fix for this but I haven’t come across it yet. My brain is running on an ‘older program’ and sometimes crashes; hard!
Thanks again.
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hello…
try this thread:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3206761?start=30&tstart=0
i will say that while i am versed in running multiple os’s on a single machine, i have not ever personally had your situation of snow leopard and mountain lion. there seem to be some grumblings about not being able to put the former on a box running the latter, which would have to be something that apple is specifically stopping in the os itself if so.
the solution of installing it on an external drive might work, but unless you have a really nice speedy connection to that drive, i would have to say that running an os that way would be pretty painful…
sorry to not have a specific answer for your case – it does seem that apple is trying to force people into mountain lion a bit, which is unfortunate.
sitruc
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Interesting thread for sure. Still reading it so thanks.
I Should mention I am not running MOUNTAIN Lion, just Lion on the big hard drive. But thinking about it more I am more inclined to install Lion on the smaller internal drive and use the larger internal for SL and my audio/video apps. Then I can just reboot from one to the other through system preferences.
I’m thinking the idea of using the target mode from my MBP which has SL and the apps on it will be better. But will I have to wipe the large drive prior to this? Seems I would if it were clean.
I could then load Lion on the smaller drive with target mode. I have a thumb drive of Lion. Then get the updates.
Maybe it could actually work!
Thanks again.
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