mounted ntfs external hard drive does not show up in finder

My Toshiba external hard drive formatted as NTFS mounts properly but does not show up in Finder. I am able to cd to the directory in terminal. I have the NTFS. I used these instructions, http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-57588773-263/how-to-manually-enable-ntfs-read-and-write-in-os-x/to enable write access to NTFS drives. It worked fine on Mountain Lion but stopped working after I updated to OSX Mavericks.

First... I'm assuming you've selected to show external hard drives on the desktop from the Finder's preferences?

And.. what exactly are you using to write to a NTFS formatted drive? The only driver we recommend is Paragon NTFS sold by Paragon for $19.95.

Forgot to add the link. Should be there now. How to manually enable NTFS read and write in OS X | MacFixIt - CNET Reviews

And yes I have selected "Preferences > Show External Disks"

OK, that's fine. Now, did you follow the directions closely that were given in the article you linked to? Did you notice that the drive will remain hidden after you have edited fstab?

When finished, press Control-O to save the file, followed by Control-X to exit, and then unmount your NTFS drive and attach it again. When you do so, the system will no longer immediately show it in the Finder, but you can go back to the Terminal and run the following command to reveal it in the hidden Volumes directory where the system mounts all attached drives:

open /Volumes

Click to expand...

I followed these instructions before I updated. Writing to the drive still works in terminal. I tested this with "echo "hello" > hello". It still works in mavericks but the problem is it just doesn't show up in finder on the sidebar. When I run "open /Volumes/" it does show up. So right now the only way I can access the drive is by opening a terminal and using the open command.

OK, I understand. That problem existed with the built in NTFS write capability of Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6.X). Sometimes it worked for me, sometimes not. Very unreliable.

Personally, I would spend the $19.95 and buy the Paragon driver from Paragon software. It works without a glitch and is seamless to OS X. Paragon NTFS.

After some google searching I found a temporary solution. In terminal I did 'chflags nohidden "/Volumes" '. I went into finder clicked on my boot drive "Macintosh HD". Then dragged /Volumes to the side bar.

And I found something else... I found people with similar problems that have found that their disks were corrupted. So i decided to check disk utility to verify disk. The option to verify disk is greyed out. Is this normal. How can one verify the disk?

edit: nm. didn't think that one through. if apple doesn't support writing to it it probably won't support verify it.

And I found something else... I found people with similar problems that have found that their disks were corrupted. So i decided to check disk utility to verify disk. The option to verify disk is greyed out. Is this normal. How can one verify the disk?

Click to expand...

That's the other problem I didn't mention about the built in NTFS write capability, and that is it sometimes caused corruption. You should be able to verify your disk by booting to your recovery partition first and run Disk Utility from the Utilities option in recovery. Hold down command and r keys, reboot. That will get you into recovery. Let me know if that works for you.

I'm with chscag - I still use and recommend giving Paragon the $20.
It's still the only NTFS driver I've not heard any problems about.