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From my new macbook pro I can connect to my iMac over the local network and access files on the iMac's internal disk. I can share the screen on the iMac and view all of the connected external storage devices. From the iMac's system preferences, I have explicitly made these eternal devices available for sharing. However, although these external devices appear in the finder on my laptop, when I attempt to access these external drives directly from the finder on my laptop I get the following error: "The operation can't be completed because the original item for "mydrivename" can't be found".

I have tried relaunching the finder on the laptop with no effect.

This is how the remote computer and it's external drives show on the laptop finder.

Finder image

And this is the result of clicking on any one of the external drives.

Error message image

Can anyone help please.

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  • PowerBook Pro? That's some long lasting hardware! can you post a screen shot of how you're "seeing" them in Finder? Also, what versions of macOS are you using on both machines. Is it Catalina on both of them?
    – Allan
    Commented Apr 6, 2020 at 23:48
  • Hi, Thanks for the response. I must have had a brain burp - my laptop is a macbook pro (not a powerbook). Both laptop and desktop are running Catalina 10.15.4. I will post images of the finder and the error.
    – Brasso
    Commented Apr 7, 2020 at 10:00

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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I managed to solve this problem using the advice found at: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250716547

Basically, on the file sharing computer switch file sharing off and then back on. On the remote macbook relaunch the finder. Now not only do the external drives appear in the finder but I can access their contents remotely.

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  • I tried and tried like you did before, and cannot get it to work. Like you suggest, I just turned off the File Sharing on my macOS Big Sur, and then wait a couple of minutes and turned it back on, and then now on my macOS Monterey, I don't even need to restart anything and I can access the whole external drive. So this is probably a bug, rather than a feature, and it comes from Apple paying low wages for the contractor to come in and do things and the full time employees not exactly know how things work but just "manage", and people withholding information at work to gain power for themselves
    – nonopolarity
    Commented Apr 13, 2022 at 4:43
  • "Basically, on the file sharing computer switch file sharing off and then back on. On the remote macbook relaunch the finder. Now not only do the external drives appear in the finder but I can access their contents remotely. " Worked for me on two Sonoma machines just now, thanks!
    – Morwen
    Commented Dec 16, 2023 at 1:38
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This happens to me when there are changes on the internal network, especially if my NAS goes to sleep or the IP gets reassigned. I find that going into Finder, and selecting Go>Connect to Server,then enter smb://drive name and Finder will reconnect. (in your case, most likely smb://HAL)

You can also input an IP address if Finder can not find the server host name.

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