Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard): CD shows up with hard drive icon in Sidebar

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
November 29th, 2007 • 12:02 pm

I already wrote recently about the flakiness of the Sidebar in Mac OS X. Here’s another example.

This morning, I needed to get a file on the iWork ’08 installation CD. So I inserted the CD and waited for it to show up in the Sidebar. And here’s what I got:

CD with hard drive icon /> </p> <p> The installation CD, with the icon of an internal hard drive… </p> <p> And it wasn’t just a one-off thing either. I tried ejecting the CD and reinserting it, and the same thing happened. I tried quitting the Finder and relaunching it, and the CD still had the hard drive icon. </p> <p> I checked the volume’s icon in the window’s title bar, and it looked just fine: </p> <p> <img decoding=

So clearly there is a problem with the Sidebar itself. I was actually able to make it disappear by inserting another software CD that had its own custom CD icon, which showed up properly in the Sidebar. I then ejected it and reinserted the same iWork ’08 installation CD. And this time it had a proper CD icon again.

It’s just a visual problem, but it’s symptomatic of the on-going flakiness of the Finder’s Sidebar. It’s not new in Mac OS X 10.5 either. I remember seeing similar problems occasionally in the Sidebar in Mac OS X 10.4. So it cannot be blamed on the lack of polish of Mac OS X 10.5’s early versions.

It will probably stay with us for a while still, possibly years, as Apple’s engineers are too busy fixing bugs that are actually destructive and disruptive. But it does not really help us perceive the Finder as a truly reliable work environment, even though it is significantly improved in Mac OS X 10.5.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Thursday, November 29th, 2007 at 12:02 pm and is filed under Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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2 Responses to “Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard): CD shows up with hard drive icon in Sidebar”

  1. ssp says:
    November 29th, 2007 at Nov 29, 07 | 12:09 pm

    Yeah, that one’s quite common. I also tend to get it when a CD that I just burned in iTunes is mounted. Really odd, particularly as I can’t remember things being that wrong in X.4.

    That said, I think the new Finder sidebar is much worse than its predecessor in pretty much every aspect bar one. So this regression is at least consistent with the rest.

  2. Adobe CS4: Yet another lousy Adobe installer « :: SceneHeat :: says:
    November 13th, 2008 at Nov 13, 08 | 7:13 pm

    […] they have been unmounted! (The Finder also keeps confusing disk images with actual hard drives and using the wrong volume icon, just for […]

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