HELP! Ghost Drives!

Question

Level 2

152 points

HELP! Ghost Drives!

hi co-forumers,

i have been tolerant and quiet about this for ages, but can no longer stand this.

when attaching external usb drives to my macbook, Finder shows them all without any problem. however, when it comes to saving a file either from the internet or offline - via any application, basically - the Open windows of those applications reveal some "mysterious" duplicates of my external drives! e.g. if the drive's title is "200GB", i see "200GB 1", "200GB 2", "200GB 3", "200GB 4" (it originally started with just one duplicate for each drive, now their number is growing, though)...

the problem is that i don't know where those duplicates are located. i figured out that my actual drive is "200GB 4" (for some unknown reason), BUT - if i fail to specify that exact location of the real drive at the moment of saving a file, the file is saved on one of those duplicates, ghost drives, which i can't access via FInder (as i don't know where they are!).

hence, dozens of important files have been saved on those ghost drives and gone for good.

please help me out, will you?!

MacBook. White, 13.3-inch, 2Ghz, 2Gb RAM, 120 Gb, Mac OS X (10.4.11)

Posted on May 25, 2009 1:32 AM

Reply

Answer 1

jsd2

Level 5

6,245 points

May 25, 2009 2:51 AM in response to Aram Rian

There is an invisible folder named /Volumes at the root level of your internal drive which is supposed to contain only the "mount points" for your volumes, but sometimes an actual folder can mistakenly get created there, possibly as a result of a failed copy operation. If /Volumes contains such a "ghost" folder with the same name as an external volume, then it might be unable to mount the real external volume without changing the name of the mount point. Such ghost folders can also waste a lot of disk space.

/Volumes is a hidden folder, but it's easy to peek into it. First you should eject and then physically disconnect all external drives. Then:

Finder>Go menu> Go to Folder
enter /Volumes and click Go

You should see an alias to the startup volume. Don't touch this, or any other aliases. Do you also see any folders which are NOT aliases, with names and sizes similar to the external volumes?

If so, drag them to the desktop, reboot, and retrieve any missing files that are not present in the real external volumes. Once you have retrieved all you need, you can put the ghost folders in the trash. Now re-connect the real external drives and check their mount points in Disk Utility - they should no longer have an added number. If all seems well, and you have all your files, you can empty the trash.

Reply

Answer 2

Aram Rian Author

Level 2

152 points

May 25, 2009 3:24 AM in response to jsd2

wow, thanks for such a quick response! much appreciated! i'll give it a try and let you know how it went.

Reply

Answer 3

Aram Rian Author

Level 2

152 points

May 25, 2009 3:31 AM in response to Aram Rian

excellent, thanks again! it's now solved. how to avoid that in the future though? is it a macbook problem? because i've never encountered anything similar to that in my powerbook g4.

Reply

Answer 4

jsd2

Level 5

6,245 points

May 25, 2009 4:11 AM in response to Aram Rian

Glad it worked! 🙂

The cause is not always clear, but I think the most common situation is a connection failure while trying to copy files to the external drive. Do you run scheduled backups? Ghosts folders can be created by backup software (such as Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper) if the real target volume becomes unavailable.

Reply