Home Folder on external firewire drive

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Home Folder on external firewire drive

I copied my home folder to my external firewire drive and used the Advanced Settings in Accounts to redirect the Volume path to the location of my new home folder.

All worked well for about a week and then for some reason the path to the home folder was renamed and was una ble to be accessed at login. I had to reinstall SL and then redirected the Home folder path back to the external drive. All worked OK for about a day and then the same issue arose.

It looks like SL is renaming the volume from "/Volumes/WD 4TB/minimac" to "/Volumes/WD 4TB 1/minimac".

Basically it is adding a 1 after the WD 4TB

When I try to edit the path in the Advanced Options in Accounts it still is unable to find the original volume.

To date the only way I can fix it is to do a clean install of SL and redirect the home folder to the external drive.

Any suggestion to stop the volme changing name?

Mac mini 2.0GHz Inten Core 2 Duo, Mac OS X (10.6.1)

Posted on Sep 24, 2009 7:15 AM

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Answer 1

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V.K.

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56,174 points

Sep 24, 2009 7:34 AM in response to MacminiOZ

drive name changing usually happens when an external drive is not unmounted cleanly or if an application tries to write to that drive when it's not there. then a phantom drive is often created. in finder go to go menu->go to folder and in the resulting popup enter /Volumes
this will open /Volumes in a finder window. that folder contains mount points for all your drives. they look like aliases. there may also be a phantom drive with the name of the external which looks like a regular folder.
this phantom drive is the problem. when finder tries to mount the external and sees that there is already something by that name in /volumes it adds 1 to the name of the mount point of the external to differentiate it from the already existing item.

delete the folder for the phantom drive form /volumes and remount the external. it will mount without 1 at the end. of course this might happen again in the future and you might have to repeat the procedure. as I said, the main reason why this happens is when a drive is not unmounted properly.

Message was edited by: V.K.

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Answer 2

MacminiOZ Author

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Sep 28, 2009 12:32 AM in response to V.K.

Great. I will give it a go and I really appreciate your feedback.
Cheers

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Answer 3

MacminiOZ Author

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Sep 30, 2009 5:50 PM in response to V.K.

Ok tried your suggestion but everytime I delete the folder it almost instantly reappears.

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Answer 4

V.K.

Level 9

56,174 points

Sep 30, 2009 5:58 PM in response to MacminiOZ

do you mean it reappears even when the actual drive is unmounted? quit all applications when doing this. also, you need to do this when not logged into an account that has its home folder on the external drive.

Message was edited by: V.K.

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Answer 5

MacminiOZ Author

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Sep 30, 2009 7:26 PM in response to V.K.

Thanks V.K. I had left the volume mounted so will now give it a go whilst unmounted and via my emergency account (set up on the internal volume). Appreciate the assistance.

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