My hard drives are showing up on my desktop

[BHuij]

Hey all—

I recently reinstalled Mavericks at 10.9.4. I had been meaning to update from 10.9.2 for a while, and finally decided to do it... apparently a day or so after 10.9.5 came out... haha so I opted to stick with 10.9.4.

I've gotten everything more or less stable (with the exception of iMessages, which I can never seem to get working correctly... haha but that is an issue for another day and another post).

The last few times I've booted my computer, I've been greeted with all of my hard drives showing up on my desktop, the way they used to in older versions of OSX. This isn't supposed to happen... it also appears that my icon size has gotten a bit smaller. Odd.

Anyone seen this? In and of itself it's not a bad problem; I just think that it means something isn't quite right, and it's kind of annoying. Anyone know a fix?

 

[edised]

I don't think there is anything wrong, they are supposed to show up on your desktop if the finder Preferences are set to do so.
Maybe after the update the settings have changed.

Go to the Finder menu >Preferences>General and tick the items you want to show up...

Hope this helps...

 

[P1LGRIM]

The last few times I've booted my computer, I've been greeted with all of my hard drives showing up on my desktop, the way they used to in older versions of OSX. This isn't supposed to happen...

Finder - Preferences - General

it also appears that my icon size has gotten a bit smaller. Odd.

Right click the desktop and then select Show View Options.

Good Luck

 

[BHuij]

I appreciate the help guys, and was indeed able to restore my desktop to looking like it's supposed to.

I guess my bigger question then is, why does this setting keep getting reset every time I shut down my computer?

The saga continues this morning: I booted up and my dock had been reset. I keep it on the left, and auto-hidden, and it was back to being visible and on the bottom, and all the icons were missing; it had gone back to the default set of applications (including question marks for applications which I don't have, like Pages and Numbers.) Rebooting did not solve the problem.

Obviously I know how to fix this, although it's a pain, but I'm more worried about why this setting isn't being preserved on shutdown.

I have one possible explanation, but I would like your feedback and ideas:

I have my OS and a few applications installed on my boot drive which is an SSD. I've never had issues with the SSD; it's always worked perfectly.

My most heavily used drive (where I have migrated my home folder and library, because I store a lot of 1080p footage, photos, music, etc.) is a Seagate 2TB non SSD drive. Both of those drives get Time Machine'd to an external USB3 2TB Seagate hard drive as backup. A few weeks ago, my internal 2TB drive apparently crashed. Upon startup I got a gray screen that persisted for several minutes. Finally it loaded my desktop but gave me some sort of error about how the internal drive had crashed. I formatted it using Disk Utility and manually restored all the files from my external backup drive. It appeared to be working normally again. This was before I upgraded to 10.9.4; I was still on 10.9.2. If the drive is still not working correctly, could it be that parts of my library and startup preferences and stuff are not loading upon boot? That to me seems like it might explain the inconsistency of startup problems.

Here's a link to the topic I posted about the HD crash originally:
www.tonymacx86.com/hardware-troubleshooting/141360-think-my-hard-drive-failed.html

Thanks for your help everyone. I'm always grateful for how awesome and willing to help the community is here.