renaming external hard drive

No, you can rename the drive.

The path to a drive is maintained in a Unix table. A drive's name is simply a sort of alias (not precisely) associated with the drive. The Unix ID for a drive is in the form "disknsm" where n and m refer to the disk number and m refers to the partition or volume number. Thus, a boot drive may have the identifier of disk0s3. The filesystem uses this identifier not the name you give the drive.

Depends on where it's installed. SATA identifies drives as simply disk1, disk2, etc. To see the Unix identifies on your computer open the Terminal app in your Utilities folder and at the prompt enter:

df

Press RETURN

Yes, the ID will change if the drive is removed or unmounted. Or in the case of an optical disc if the disc is ejected.

You actually have several partitions on a formatted drive, but the first ones are invisible to you because they are used by the directory and the operating system. Thus, the first partition you will see is the volume you formatted which is slice 3 or s3.

If you look at what df displays you will see if you have anything mounted with the same Unix ID. My guess is that's not the case. However, you may find the volume alias in a different directory - /Volumes. This is where the volume references are found (the names you created.) If you find a Media and a Media 1 there, then delete the wrong one.

They external drive has the same name regardless of which machine it's connected. However, the Unix ID is entirely dependent upon the computer setup and how many devices are connected to it. For example if the computer at work is a tower with four internal drives and you connect an external drive, then the external drive will become disk5 (disk1-disk4 are already used.) When you take it home and connect it to your laptop with only one drive, then it will become disk2 (disk1 is the internal drive.) However, if iTunes is set up to look for its folder on the external drive, then it will always look there because internally it identifies the drive by its given name and the path to the iTunes folder, for example, /MyExternalDrive/Music/iTunes/. That remains the same regardless of machine.

No, all you need to do is change the path in iTunes or iPhoto. Nothing is messed up. Same in most any other application.

But you're only changing the iTunes' folder's path, nothing else. It has no effect on where you store your other files.

I think the easiest way to keep from being over-whelmed by tons of audio files is to store the actual music somewhere else. The iTunes folder would still be in your home Music folder, but the actual music files would be somewhere else. Thus the iTunes folder inside /Users/yourname/Music would have contents like this:

Album Artwork
iTunes 4 Music Library
iTunes Library
iTunes Music
iTunes Music Library.xml
Previous iTunes Libraries

But the iTunes Music folder in that location is completely empty. Instead, the iTunes Music folder the contains the actual music files is located elsewhere. In my case, it is in my Shared folder. In yours it would on a different drive, something like /Volumes/Sounds/iTunes Music.

If that is the case, launch iTunes, go to iTunes Preferences, click on the Advanced gear icon in the toolbar, make sure the General tab is selected, and the very first item is "iTunes Music folder location"--click the Change button, then navigate to the external drive and select the folder. That should do it.
Francine


Francine
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