Ask Jacob
Stay Put, Hard Disk Icon!
Friday, May 26, 2006 / Mac OS X
For some reason the Macintosh HD icon on my eMac keeps appearing near the middle of the desktop, instead of staying put on the top right-hand corner each time I boot up. It doesn’t appear to do this from a restart – it normally just happens after I have gone home from the night and waits for me to power-up the next morning. It is currently running Panther.
Funnily, I had similar thing happen to my old Clamshell i-book that is running 10.2.8 Jaguar, but it stopped doing this after I used the ‘Safe Boot’ (by holding down the shift button at startup). I tried safebooting the eMac, but to no avail, every morning the HD icon doesn’t stay put in the top left hand corner. I wouldn’t say that the desktop is overly crowded with icons either.
A few things may be causing this to happen so I am going to have you try three things. First click on your desktop once. Then hold down the “Control” key and click again without releasing the mouse button. A menu window will appear next to the pointer. Select “Show View Options” from the menu. A small window will open. Towards the bottom of the window will be a checkbox labeled “Keep arranged by” with a pull down menu below it. Check the checkbox and change the pull down menu to “Kind.”
Next, from the same window check your icon and font size. The icon should be about 40X40 and the text should be 12 pt. You may want to adjust the size of both the icon and text to see if those are affecting your system.
Lastly check to see that your hard drive’s name has no extra spaces. To do this, click once on the hard drive icon and once again on the name of the hard drive. The hard drive name will be highlighted meaning you can edit it. Retype the hard drive’s name as you like it to appear. Click any place on the desktop when done.
One of those three things should fix your problem.
