Strange - invisble Hard drives in El Capitan (showing and usable thru disk Util)

[Blog]

Just as the title says. I sometimes have problems seeing my hard drives in El Capitan...but its quite intermittent.

When I boot in to El Capitan I only see the El Capitan Hard drive either on my desktop or in Finder. No other hard drives show up in either Finder or on the desktop. Plus, El Captian hard drive is showing as external not internal. I enter Disk utility and see all my Hard drives there and fully mounted. The odd thing is that they are all showing as external hard drives with the exception of my actual external drive showing properly as external. I can then click on each hard drive and click 'show in finder' and the contents of the hard drive will pop up in a new finder window but not in Finder itself or on the desktop. I then I proceed to unmount and remount each hard drive and they begin to appear both in Finder and on the desktop. This is a strange issue that I am finding difficult to troubleshoot due to the fact that its intermittent. I have 5 internal Hard drives and 1 external USB 3.0 Hard drive. I also have a USB 3.0 Lexar card reader connected. They all work totally fine except for the above issues.

Other times El Capitan boots totally fine without these issues.

Anyone else experiencing similar issues?

 

[Blog]

[Solved] Strange - invisble Hard drives in El Capitan (showing and usable thru disk Util)

After taking care of a few other El Capitan issues with my system I decided to tackle the intermittent drives showing and then not showing. I did some quick searching about the problem and it was solved a long time ago in earlier OSX releases.

Apparently Multi-beast has the solution built in as a choice but there is no Multibeast for El Capitan yet. The solution is to have IOACHCIBlockStorage.kext inside System/Library/Extensions. I tried Mulitbeast for Yosemite but it kept crashing when I tried to build the install. So I downloaded IOACHCIBlockStorage.kext from elsewhere and manually installed it and ran Kext utility to repair install. As soon as I rebooted the hard drives were normal again and recognized as they should be.

Now I have a totally 100% working El Capitan install (including onboard sound, no DSDT, USB 3.0, 4k monitor + two 1080P multi-monitor setup) on my quite old but still fast system. I'll keep my Mavericks install for a while just in case problems arise.

 

[ammulder]

FYI, there is a simple entry you can put in config.plist to fix the internal-drives-show-as-external problem, but I have no idea whether it addresses the intermittent thing. So stick with your working solution.

 

[Blog]

Thanks. So far I haven't had the intermittent issue since doing the fix...fingers crossed. If it happens again I'll post.

FYI, there is a simple entry you can put in config.plist to fix the internal-drives-show-as-external problem, but I have no idea whether it addresses the intermittent thing. So stick with your working solution.