When doing a File > Save As... after opening the Where: drop-down menu, I now have grayed-out items in the Favorites area, and I want to remove these. The grayed-out items point to folders that were on a partition of the MBP's SSD that I resized. Surely there's a way to do this, but I haven't found it... TIA
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How to delete useless items in Where dropdown lists?
- Thread starter Al2O3
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So I take it that these folders no longer exist? And that the partition was erased when you resized it? It may be an indexing error. Have a look at this article on how to rebuild your Spotlight Index.
Yes, the original folders are gone. They were on a data partition I had to delete in order to resize the boot partition. (I copied back the files that were on the data partition and although the folder names are the same, the system treats them as being different.)
I investigated re-indexing the Spotlight Index, but I don't think anything is wrong with it. I used EasyFind to look for files containing "Bin" (the name of one of the orphan folders) and quite a few 'string' files were in the results, but none that I opened had the folder items I am looking for. I think the now-useless data pointing to these disappeared folders is in some setting file that's out of reach (but I don't really know). The free version of TinkerTool didn't help but TinkerTool System4 might. Thank you for your suggestion.
It won't hurt anything to try and re-build the spotlight index.
Does it appear under Favorites, or Devices in the "Where dropdown?" If so, you might need to open a Finder window, make sure you have Sidebar shown, and drag it out from there.
I used Titanium Software's 'Maintenance' app to rebuild the Spotlight index, and clean the System and User caches, and clean Obsolete, temporary, and Recent Items. Still no joy...
The pointers to these 'dead' folders appear under the Favorites section in the Where drop-down menu when using Save As... All my Sidebar links in Finder windows are functional.
I had an alias to one of the 'dead' folders on the Dock, and it retained its custom icon after the partition/data restore operation, so I didn't think anything of it until I tried to use it, and nothing happened, its invalidity was revealed. It was easy to drag this dead item off the Dock and drag the 'new' folder (same name, same custom icon) onto the Dock.
Viewing the Where drop-down list in the Finder Save As..., I tried dragging the dead items out (with Cmd, Opt, and Cmd-Opt keys also), but they're adamantly untouchable. If a dead item is clicked, nothing happens, the destination for the save remains unchanged.
Perhaps these dead items will magically disappear down the road, but I would like to know how to destroy them. I looked in various plist files etc. but didn't find anything that seemed relevant.
I have lost my "favorites" in the past by deleting certain plist files. When it happened to me, it was unintended, but a result of trying to clear up other problems.
Try this in terminal
rm ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist
rm ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.sidebarlists.plist
For better instructions on that, check this out:
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/finder.html
Thank you for the link and suggestions. If my OCD flares up, I'll delete the above plists but for the moment I'd like to preserve my customizations. I tried TinkerTool System 4 (Clean Up Orphaned Files, and Clean Up Aliases) and although it found a couple of items, their removal didn't get rid of the dead Favorites entries. There was a reference to the deleted partition in sidebarlists.plist, but removing the code made no difference. Perhaps the 10.11.2 update will clear this up.