Strange External Drive Icons in Mac OS 26 Finder Sidebar!

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Strange External Drive Icons in Mac OS 26 Finder Sidebar!

Good day, everyone,

I have 7 external SSD/HDD drives connected to my MacBook Pro (M3). Recently, I noticed that the drive icons in the Finder sidebar no longer appear as their usual disk icons. Instead, they show up as “tilted checklist”-style icons (or something similar). All the same for all the disks (from different brands and diffent kinds (SSD/NVMe/HDD).

When I check the drives in Disk Utility, everything looks fine — the correct icons display there as expected. On the desktop, the proper icons also appear, and I can access and write data to all drives without any issues.

I’ve already tried the usual fixes: toggling sidebar preferences, disconnecting and reconnecting the drives, rebooting, etc., but nothing seems to help. Today I updated to macOS 26.0.1 hoping this might have been fixed, but the problem remains.

Has anyone else come across this behavior? Does anyone know how to restore the proper drive icons in the sidebar? I know it’s just a minor cosmetic issue, but it bugs me. 😉

Screenshot attached.

Thank you!

[Edited by Moderator]

MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 26.0

Posted on Oct 1, 2025 10:22 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

neuroanatomist

Level 9

55,905 points

Oct 2, 2025 6:29 AM in response to Kostadin

I suspect you have a 3rd party extension or app that is customizing your icons. I have several Samsung SSDs, and unlike yours they show up with generic orange drive icons on the Desktop, with the exception of the ones used for Time Machine backups (because macOS only mounts the sparsebundle image for those).

Those are standard Apple icons. The ones showing up in your screenshots are not 'normal', they are already customized and it appears that customization is broken for the Finder sidebar because your 3rd party software isn't fully compatible with Tahoe.

I would bet that Safe Mode will show icons like mine, since that disables 3rd party extensions. You'll need to contact the developer for whatever software you're using to customize your drives.

UNLESS...you have manually edited the icons for those drives in the Get Info windows (not sure if that works in Tahoe). If so, and the customized icons you've manually applied in Finder aren't showing up in the sidebar, then that's a potential bug and can be reported to Apple. Feedback - macOS - Apple

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Answer 2

tbirdvet

Level 6

17,090 points

Oct 2, 2025 5:52 AM in response to Kostadin

Strange. Mine show as drive icons. Perhaps restart in Safe Mode and see if anything changes. If OK then restart normally.

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Answer 3

Oct 24, 2025 11:22 AM in response to de blacksheep

In another thread, a couple of different 3rd party extension were identified that were the cause of similar issues.

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Answer 4

Oct 2, 2025 6:40 AM in response to Kostadin

Kostadin wrote:

Strange External Drive Icons in Mac OS 26 Finder Sidebar!

I have 7 external SSD/HDD drives connected to my MacBook Pro (M3). Recently, I noticed that the drive icons in the Finder sidebar no longer appear as their usual disk icons. Instead, they show up as “tilted checklist”-style icons (or something similar). All the same for all the disks (from different brands and diffent kinds (SSD/NVMe/HDD).