Desktop drive icons moved after restart
Several users have noticed an issue in which mounted drive appear in different locations upon reboot.
Monday, July 21
Several users have noticed an issue in which mounted drive appear in different locations upon reboot. MacFixIt forum member pgwerner writes:
"I've been having a bit of a problem with my desktop drive icons jumping around to different parts of the desktop when the system is rebooted. I was hoping this would go away when I upgraded from 10.3.9 to 10.5.3, and while icons are now more stable, the problem hasn't gone away entirely."
This problem has occurred, in particular, for users who have upgraded from previous versions of OS X, and could be from a corrupt hidden ".DS_Store" file in the desktop folder.
Fixes
Remove the .DS_Store file from the desktop folder The Finder uses ".DS_Store" files to store organization and display information about Finder windows and content and keeps one in the every folder, including the Desktop, for this purpose. Use the following command in the terminal to remove the .DS_Store file on the Desktop (The Finder will recreate a healthy .DS_Store file when needed): sudo rm ~/Desktop/.DS_Store
Use drive alias files on the desktop Instead of showing drives on the desktop, create alias files of the drives and put those on the desktop instead. Then in the Finder preferences in the "General" section, uncheck the "Hard disks" and "External disks" options.
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