APP does not show external hard drive

@mannysWhen you open the dialog to set your working directory, click the down arrow at the end of 'Look In' then click the forward slash, then click volumes and it will show all of your external hard drives

When I do that (drive formatted as ExFat) I get:

Astro Pixel Processor can not write
to the chosen Working Directory:

/Volumes

Please fix this issue by

- adjusting the Working Directory to a location
where APP is allowed to write temporary files.

The button to set the Working Directory is the big button
above the menus 0)-6) on the left side.

In safety and security APP has permissions everywhere...

Posted by: @donald

↑

Astro Pixel Processor can not write
to the chosen Working Directory:

/Volumes

That is correct. No application may write to /Volumes. You need to select the directory within /Volumes to write to.

Hi @donald,

Indeed, like Wouter @wvreeven indicates, the /Volumes location is only for mounting the drives, so can't be used, it is forbidden by the macOS operating system.

Is all okay now?

no obviously it is not ok. I never said I want to write to /volumes. I can't mount my external disk as it is not listed at /volumes. So how do I mount my external disk in APP? quite ridiculous that APP doesn't see that disk or any disk on Mac as other apps do...

@donald The error message you mentioned in your post of January 14 indicated that you were trying to set /Volumes as the working directory for APP. Perhaps you didn't copy the error message in its entirety. Not sure.

However, I just tried to access an external hard disk via APP and I run into the same issue. My disk is called T7 and, when I try to access it in APP, I don't see any of the subdirectories. When I try to select the disk directory as working directory in APP, I get the following popup:

Worse,APP cannot load files from external disks because of the same issue. When I click the Lights button in tab 1 and try to browse to the external disk, again no subdirectories show up.

Obviously it is not correct that APP doesn't show the subdirectories because the disk is accessible by my user on macOS.

@mabula-admin Please investigate and fix. I remember that older APP versions were able to use external disks as working directory and I am 100% sure that I used to load FITS files from external disks!

Well your APP sees your T7... that's one full step further than I come...

If this is a needed fix maybe this is a good extension on that idea:

Make APP able to access/use multiple disks. So when one is full it automatically goes on on the second or third disk like Photoshop is able to write working files to multiple disks hen the actual disk is overflowing.

Hi @wvreeven and @donald,

Okay, I will investigate this with high priority. I was not aware that this no longer works on macOS.

I suspect it has everything to do with all the changes that Apple keeps making in macOS related to privacy and security... on which macOS version are you experiencing this?

Mabula

Monterey: 12.7.3

Hi Donald @donald & @wvreeven,

I am not sure what is going here. I am on macOS Sonoma with the macs that I use to build/compile APP for both macOS Intel and Apple Silicon. On both macs, an iMac Pro 2017 and an mac mini M1 2020 I can access an external drive without issues and set my working directory on the external drive as well provided that the drive is first mounted using macOS Finder. Please see the screenshot:

Wouter, could it be that in your case, that the working directory was set previously, but then was unmounted in macOS before starting APP again? If you mount the drive with finder, all should be okay.

I will now test this behaviour with the macOS native file chooser, if that works without having to first to mount the drive with finder, I will choose to make the native file chooser the default file chooser again allthough CMD-A will not work in that chooser.

Oh and Donald and Wouter, if still encountering issues, I would suggest to completely remove APP. Remove all entries for APP from security and privacy settings. Then install APP 2.0.0-beta28 from the downloads section (at top of webpage) and approve whatever macOS asks you to allow APP to do. Then all should be okay I would think.

Mabula

Hi @donald & @wvreeven,

I am still not sure what is going on your macs with accessing an external drive. All is working fine here on my macs. To be sure, I have made the native macOS file chooser the default chooser again in the next release 2.0.0-beta29, because that also should help here in accessing network shares or external drives on mac computers 😉 :

Mabula

Tnx. I'll look into that later today.

App verwijderd, versie 29 geinstalleerd, geen vermelding bij privacy en beveiliging, geen verschil. Ziet nog steeds geen externe schijven opent ook niet met de finder maar met het eigen zoekscherm.

Back to English, sorry.

Yes I now have access to external drives! But... not by the Finder... I got version 29 and still got the APP native finder.

Now logically following this issue... can you provide for more than one drive? So when one is full APP can seamlessly switch to a next drive? I'd like to use my internal 2 TB and an additional Samsung T7 2TB to get a total of 3+ TB available to APP.

Hi Donald @donald,

beta29 was not yet released, only beta29-test1 for another issue.

Please try now 😉 I have released beta29 today and this has the native macOS file chooser.

The request to use several harddrives will take some time to implement, because we need to adjust many things for that I think. I did put it on our issue list though 😉

Mabula

Wonderful 😀