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a weird question: DISK UTILITY (and other utilities) are somehow missing?

wfriedwald

wfriedwald

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
on my 2020 M1 MacBook Air

somehow the UTILITIES folder is empty! no idea how that happened.

I just upgraded to the latest Tahoe 26.2

but somehow DISK UTILITY has gone missing!

How I can install it? (Or is there another way to initialize or format a hard drive?)

thanks for feedback!

w
 
26.6.2 I assume?

They're not "missing" - those utilities are on the protected volume, so there's no WAY for them to be missing. They're just not visible to your user.

System Settings > Users & Groups, is your user type "Admin" or something else?
 
my user type seems to be an ADMIN

when I go to the APPLICATIONS folder and the UTILITIES subfolder, it appears to be empty.

very confusing, by the way, they were not there (or not visible) before I just did the upgrade (yes, 26.6.2) that's why I was motivated to upgrade today, but they're still not there (or not visible to me) I can try shutting down and restarting as another user... but yes, curious, you will admit!

thanks as always for feedback!

w
 
wfriedwald said:
when I search using spotlight, it doesn't come up, but I wonder if there's a way to do a search for hidden files?
Click to expand...
You can quickly toggle hidden files to visible in the Finder by hitting the shortcut ⌘⇧period (.) Hit it again to toggle them to invisible again.

This is a very weird problem, though. If it was me I’d reboot into Recovery and run Disk Utility from the recovery partition. https://support.apple.com/en-us/102518

Also, this should go without saying, but your files are backed up, right?
 
When Finder shows /Applications/Utilities it is actually showing a merging of /System/Applications/Utilities and /Applications/Utilities. I can't imagine why Finder is failing to display the utilities from the sealed volume.

It's hard to wrangle Finder into not lying about file system location when investigating this merging. But, if you put Finder into column view and select System, then Applications, then Utilities, do you see all the usual utilities then?
 
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Reactions: Brian33
On my Studio I've seen Spotlight go sideways after a point-release upgrade — `sudo mdutil -i off /` then `sudo mdutil -i on /` will force a full reindex. Separately, if svenmany's Finder-column trick shows the apps actually sitting in /System/Applications/Utilities, you're dealing with a Finder cache or Launch Services issue, not missing files. `killall Finder` is worth trying first, and if that doesn't help a Launch Services rebuild via lsregister usually clears it.
 
Benholt ...

Your reply 9 above illustrates exactly why I never bothered with spotlight from the time it was first introduced a number of years ago.

If the OP was using EasyFind, he would have found what he was looking for by now...😎
 
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