Well it seems like it happens from time to time that one of the expected prefPanes in SystemPreferences is not displayed anymore.

The magic question is:

How to recover it ?

I’ve collected some ideas you could try (my example is based on the sharing prefpane which tends to cause some problems), so lets see if the following hints work for you.

Check if the related file itself exists

As a first step you really should check if the prefPane itself does exists in your Mac OS X installation or not. Usually you should find all the Apple prefpanes in:

/System/Library/PreferencePanes

In my 10.5 installation the folder content looks like that:

I hope your prefpane itself does exists otherwise solving the problem might be much more difficult … but lets continue with the next steps.

Check if it’s related with your user account

Before trying to fix the issue itself we should try to gather more informations first. A good idea is always a quick log-in into your Mac OS X installation using another user-account. So if you have just one account right now, create a new user and test if the prefPane is missing for that account too.

If you are new to Mac OS X you can find instructions on how to create new user accounts here:

• 10.4 Adding a new user account to your computer
• 10.5 Adding a new user account to your computer

So now, log-out of your current account and check if the related prefpane is displayed in SystemPreferences of the new user account.

You might ask why we do that – the answer is pretty simple:

If the problem only appears with your user account we can guess that it is related with files & settings in your old users Library folder.

I assume the problem occurs only in the old user account – so lets see how we can fix it now

Deleting your users prefPane-Cache

So lets navigate in Finder to:

/Users/ENTER-YOUR-USERNAME-HERE/Library/Caches/

and delete all files matching the following pattern

com.apple.preferencepanes.*

On my 10.5 installation the related files would be:

• com.apple.preferencepanes.cache
• com.apple.preferencepanes.searchindexcache

For sure you could easily do the entire task in Terminal.app too – following those instructions:

• Close System Preferences.app
• Open Terminal.app (located in /Applications/Utilities/)
• Enter: cd ~/Library/Caches
• Enter: rm com.apple.preferencepanes.*

Now re-open System-Preferences and check if the missing prefPane is back or not.

I guess the most cases should be solved now – but what if you had no luck and are still missing it ?

Restore prefPane from other source

Another idea would be restoring the prefPane file(s) from your backup, another mac running the same version of Mac OS X or from your install medium (Apple Installation DVD).

A helpful tool (if you are trying to recover files from your install DVD) is Pacifist which is unfortunally not freeware – but hey – it’s about fixing your system.

About pacifist:

Shareware application that opens Mac OS X .pkg package files, .dmg disk image files, and .zip, .tar, .tar.gz, .tar.bz2, and .xar archive files and allows you to extract individual files and folders out of them. This is useful, for instance, if an application which is installed by the operating system becomes damaged and needs to be reinstalled without the hassle of reinstalling all of Mac OS X (for example, if you had accidentally deleted Preview and wanted to reinstall it, but not the whole operating system). Pacifist is also able to verify existing installations and find missing or altered files, and also has the ability to examine the kernel extensions installed in /System/Library/Extensions to determine which ones were installed by Apple and which may have been installed by third-party installers.

In general you should first backup your current files – replace the prefPane with your new prefPane and check if that helps.

The ARD issue

Several users reported that the installation of the Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) client causes this problem (missing sharing prefPane).

You might ask why – the answer is easy:

ARD actually modifies the prefpane

So if you are using ARD, consider upgrading your local ARD client.

The End

I hope those ideas helps solving your problem.

If you have additional informations, hints or similar on how to fix this issue feel free to use the comment function below.

Best regards

fidel

Tags: 10.4, 10.5, missing prefpane, preference pane, prefpane, recover, Restore, system preferences