Tried "Show Parent," Created "Invalid Drive"

[Nicky3540]

I was reading Victoria's Quickstart book and read on page 35 about using Show Parent Folder to visualize where photos are stored on the hard drive. So I control-clicked on my internal drive and on my external drive to see the folder structure and got error messages. (Didn't take a screen shot of them and can't reproduce them now.) But now, all the folders on my external drive are grayed out and the word "invalid" is next to the drive name and all the folders. See screen shot of left panel below.

I've tried control-clicking on the parent folders again and can't even get the Show/Hide Parent Folders options to appear. Also tried quitting and restarting Lr, ejecting and reconnecting the hard drive, and restarting my Mac. Nothing works.

How do I restore access to that drive and all its files?

Thanks in advance for your help.

 

[Nicky3540]

This is Nicky again. I did manage to reproduce the error message. Here it is.

 

[Nicky3540]

Me again. After trying lots of fixes, I just gave up and restored a backed-up catalog. So, problem fixed, but I still don't know how it was created.

 

[Johan Elzenga]

The Mac has a hidden 'Volumes' folder, that is used to keep track of all the disks. By going too far in your 'Show Parent Folder' steps, you went beyond the disk hierarchy and ended up in this folder.

 

[LouieSherwin]

Although I don't think that Adobe anticipated someone trying to "Show Parent" of a hard drive this is probably a bug in Lightroom. I suggest that your also report this on the official feedback site.

Glad that you had a recent backup to recover from.

-louie

 

[Nicky3540]

The Mac has a hidden 'Volumes' folder, that is used to keep track of all the disks. By going too far in your 'Show Parent Folder' steps, you went beyond the disk hierarchy and ended up in this folder.

Thank you, Johan. Yes, in trying to fix the problem earlier, I compared my restored catalog hierarchy with the "invalid" one and saw that a "Volumes" folder had been added. I thought that might be part of the problem, so I looked for that folder on my hard drive and couldn't find it. Now I know why: it's hidden.

 

[Nicky3540]

Although I don't think that Adobe anticipated someone trying to "Show Parent" of a hard drive this is probably a bug in Lightroom. I suggest that your also report this on the official feedback site.

Glad that you had a recent backup to recover from.

-louie

Good idea, Louie. I'll report it. Thanks.