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I've got a minor problem which has been irritating me for some time. Whenever my Mac has a USB storage device mounted in Finder, it shows a circle instead of the usual USB icon.

I'm not sure when this started (Mac is running 10.14.4 at the moment), but it is consistent with all storage devices and it's strange because the icon appears normally both at the top of Finder and on the Desktop.

Please see the images below for clarity:

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Does anyone have any idea why it is the case that this strange circle appears as the icon in the side bar for all USB storage devices?

If so, is there a way I can restore the standard USB icon you would expect (and can see at the top of the Finder window)?

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2 Answers 2

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These icons are a bug caused by the app What's Your Sign?. Uninstall the app, reboot, and your Finder sidebar volume icons should return to normal. There's an open issue for this bug at the What's Your Sign? github so it doesn't appear as if the issue is fixed even in the most recent release.

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I have those now, too. I assumed the sidebar icon had just been changed to those circles in a recent update.

enter image description here

As far as I know, the default sidebar icons are still located here:

/System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources/

You should be able to swap any or all of them out for any icons you want. Just give your new icon the same name as the one you are replacing and make sure it is a .icns file. You will probably need to disable SIP in order to do this.

EDIT: On closer look, I don't see any dots amongst the default sidebar icons in CoreTypes. I wonder if it may have something to do with disk permissions....

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  • Thanks for your reply, glad to see that I'm not alone with this issue. Would you be able to edit your answer to better explain how to solve the problem?
    – Rocco
    Commented Apr 10, 2019 at 14:51
  • Given that those circular icons are not appearing in the normal location for the default sidebar icons, I'm not sure what the solution is, at this point. I'm running a scan with Svein Bjorn's IconScanner [ sveinbjorn.org/iconscanner ] right now to try to find those circular sidebar icons. If we can locate them, we should be able to swap them out.
    – Kerlix
    Commented Apr 10, 2019 at 15:42
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    I can't find an icon within any OS resource bundle that resembles these dots & is named anything involving 'sidebar' or 'location' or 'drive'. My best guess, at this point, is that you have stumbled upon a bug & that somehow the image file used for 'Tags', which are generally shown in the sidebar just below 'Locations', was somehow erroneously input for the non-OS drives. Or someone decided turning non-OS drives into dots was a good way to differentiate between the two, but that doesn't explain why the old sidebar icons still exist in the CoreTypes bundle. Will update if I find an answer.
    – Kerlix
    Commented Apr 10, 2019 at 20:04
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    I have a vague memory that there are conditions under which the sidebar icon can be a circular progress bar; perhaps it's a full one of those for some reason?
    – Kevin Reid
    Commented Apr 11, 2019 at 0:14
  • @KevinReid Are your external drive icons also circles?
    – Kerlix
    Commented Apr 12, 2019 at 1:43

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