External drive shows up twice on desktop

Thanks, but they don't show much. Before I post the results, I had formatted and renamed the disk. Before I saw two disks with the same name, now I see two disks with different names. Here's what I see in Terminal:

Last login: Thu Oct 9 15:24:58 on console
You have mail.
[Jim-Halls-Computer:~] jimhall% /Volumes/Lacie\ Big\ Disk\ formatted
/Volumes/Lacie Big Disk formatted: Permission denied.
[Jim-Halls-Computer:~] jimhall%

st login: Fri Oct 10 09:01:31 on ttys000
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[Jim-Halls-Computer:~] jimhall% /Volumes/LaCie\ Disk
/Volumes/LaCie Disk: Permission denied.
[Jim-Halls-Computer:~] jimhall%

As I mentioned in the first post and it may not be relevant, but the renamed drive shows up as a generic orange and white icon and the "original" LaCie drive shows up as a icon image of the drive case. The "original" drive seems to contain no data at this point, but in the past it has contained identical data to the renamed drive.

All a bit strange isn't it?

Disk utility shows two volumes:

189.9 GB LaCie Group SA "Lacie Big Disk Formatted"

189.9 GB LaCie Group SA "LaCie Disk"

When this first happened I wiped, reformatted and renamed the drive. The first few times it mounted just fine, but later the second drive with the original name and icon reappeared. A small file placed in the second drive does not appear in the reformatted drive. It's behaving as if there are two drives.

I'm not sure how to delete the partition with Disk Utility, and I did a wipe and restore without creating a partition (honestly, don't know how to).

using Disk Utility's get info command I get this:

Name : LaCie Group SA
Type : Disk

Partition Map Scheme : Apple Partition Map
Disk Identifier : disk2
Media Name : Maxtor 6 B200P0 Media
Media Type : Generic
Connection Bus : FireWire
Connection ID : 58629606454359246
Device Tree : fw/node@d04b51020874ce/sbp-2@c000/@0:0
Writable : Yes
Ejectable : Yes
Mac OS 9 Drivers Installed : Yes
Location : External
Total Capacity : 189.9 GB (203,928,109,056 Bytes)
S.M.A.R.T. Status : Not Supported
Disk Number : 2
Partition Number : 0


Name : LaCie Group SA
Type : Disk

Partition Map Scheme : Apple Partition Map
Disk Identifier : disk3
Media Name : Maxtor 6 B200P0 Media
Media Type : Generic
Connection Bus : FireWire
Connection ID : 58629606454359246
Device Tree : fw/node@d04b51020874ce/sbp-2@c000/@1:0
Writable : Yes
Ejectable : Yes
Mac OS 9 Drivers Installed : Yes
Location : External
Total Capacity : 189.9 GB (203,928,109,056 Bytes)
S.M.A.R.T. Status : Not Supported
Disk Number : 3
Partition Number : 0

I meant the drive was wiped of all data, a secure wipe, and restored.

I've just followed your directions and I can say we have a real mystery on our hands. No change, two drives still showing up. I did the following:

Eject one of the phantom drives. Erase all data securely on the remaining icon, then partition. Unmount, remount and two drives appear.

I did it to both, and can't get rid of the other drive icon.

I'm at the point I think it's time to get a new drive and physically destroy this one. DiskWarrior and TechTool are still seeing two drives.

My issue began before the last update so I'm not sure it's OSX related. The firmware update from LaCie may have had something to do with it. Certainly erasing and partitioning the drive did not fix it, and my other externals are doing fine.

This is a final followup to my "dual drive" problem.

I cracked the enclosure of the LaCie 400 gig Big Drive and found inside two 200 gig Maxtor drives. I'll never know why they began showing up as separate drives, but there was nothing I could do to get them back to their original configuration. I hate to waste an enclosure so I'll be looking into replacing them both, possibly with larger capacity drives.

The end result is that the problem was not with OSX, but with the drive itself that stopped being one drive and became what it really is, two drives in one enclosure.

Partitioned as instructed, unmounted and powered down drive.

Powered up drive and now have two drives, one named LaCie 4 (new name given in last try) and Untitled 1

thanks for giving it the old college try. I'm going to dump it and get a new drive.