Reader's question: Macintosh HD icon can no longer be found on the desktop

I am in close contact with my reader Josef, because his two Macs and the combination of router (Fritz! Box) and two printers sometimes don't work the way he wants. Now he had the problem with an older iMac that it no longer recognized his USB stick with the system as a bootable stick and he was without a bootable system.

I then created and sent him a USB stick with El Capitan, with which he could put the iMac back on again. The only drawback after the installation: The desktop suddenly looks different than before, because the icon of the Macintosh HD hard drive was no longer visible on the desk.

Sorry, but unfortunately I had to recreate the Macintosh HD icon because my desk was too littered to show it publicly.

Macintosh HD no longer to be found

Here is his comment on it:

Thanks for the boot stick! Yes, I was able to install the system and it works. What I find funny: The HDD is not visible on the desk, it is usually always on the top right. I'll find it with Siri, show it in Finder, okay. Then I want to drag it onto the desk, but then I get the message "Cannot move to a subfolder." Haha.

To understand: Moving the Macintosh HD onto the desktop does not technically work because the "Desktop" is a subfolder in the user folder on the Macintosh HD. It's hard to put a filing cabinet in a file that is in the same filing cabinet. ;-)

Small changes to the settings after reinstallation

The reason for this behavior is that after reinstallation, Macs sometimes behave differently than before, because Apple changes the default settings here and there.

In this case it was settings in the Finder that we can easily restore to the state that Josef is used to.

It works like this:

1. in the Finder on the "Finder" menu in the upper left corner
2. select "Settings" there
3. "General" tab
4. In the settings "Show these objects on the desktop", check the "Hard disks" and "External hard disks"

From the point of view of this, everything should then be back to normal.

In the "Finder" menu you will find the "Settings" item, which you should select.

In the Finder's settings you can determine whether hard drives such as the Macintosh HD should be displayed on the desktop or not.

Macintosh HD also appears in the sidebar of the Finder window

There is another way to get to your Macintosh HD hard drive: If you open a new Finder window with CMD + N, you can use the menu "View"> "Show Sidebar" to show the bar on the left if it is not yet visible should.

There you scroll to the area "Places" and find in the list next to the external hard drives also the internal hard drive "Macintosh HD".

The Macintosh HD can also be found in the sidebar of the Finder window.

More settings for the finder

If you want to make more settings on the Finder, I can still give you the tools MacPilot and TinkerTool that offer many options to set up the finder the way you would like it to be.

With TinkerTool you have a few options to change the Finder that you don't get with macOS itself.

Jen Kleinholz( Founder & Sir Apfelot )

Jens has been running the blog since 2012. He appears as Sir Apfelot for his readers and helps them with problems of a technical nature. In his free time he drives electric unicycles, takes photos (preferably with his iPhone, of course), climbs around in the Hessian mountains or hikes with the family. His articles deal with Apple products, news from the world of drones or solutions for current bugs.