How to make external disks reappear on desktop in Mountain Lion?

After upgrading from Lion to Mountain Lion, my MBP does not show icons for external drives on the desktop any more. In the Finder preferences, “External disks” is checked under “Show these items on the desktop”. Any ideas?

Solution 1:

Somehow, the upgrade to Mountain Lion enabled the hidden Finder setting that completely hides desktop icons. You can reenable it using

defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool true

Solution 2:

There's a much easier way of doing this. Go to Finder-->Preferences and the select the items you want to show on the desktop. Options are hard disks, external disks, "CDs, DVDs, and iPods," and Connected servers.

Solution 3:

Aha! Just after posting my own frustration with this problem, and how none of the solutions provided here were working for me, I noticed one stray white pixel at the top left of my screen. Turns out it was the edge of the text name of a missing drive icon.

It appears that some drives are mounting with their icon at the screen origin (or possibly even further offscreen).

Try using "Clean Up By Name" to bring the drive icon back onto the screen. If that fails, this might work:

1. Click anywhere on the desktop.
2. Type the first few characters of the name of the missing drive.
3. Hold the Shift ⇧ key and click on another icon.
4. Drag the second icon around and see if the missing one is coming along for the ride.