Harddrive mount point name changed from HD to HD 1. How do I revert back?

Question

Harddrive mount point name changed from HD to HD 1. How do I revert back?

After what I assume was a restart gone bad, one of my internal drives was assigned a new mount point name. The drive appears as *Storage HD* in Finder, but in Disk Utility it appears as *Storage HD 1*. Can anyone tell me how to rename this mount point back to Storage HD, as it originally was?

My home folder is located on this drive, and I had to remap it to reflect the new mount point name. Now, everything works perfectly, but the mount point name is wrong and I would like to have it renamed to what it originally was. I have tried searching high and low, but so far I have not found a solution. I fould one article that pertained to solving this issue in OS X Server, but none that describes how to rename a mount point in OS X. The OS X Server article is, as I understood it, useless in regards to OS X.

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

Mac Pro 1,1, Mac OS X (10.6.4)

Posted on Jul 12, 2010 2:27 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

jsd2

Level 5

6,245 points

Jul 12, 2010 5:08 AM in response to Passionless Cupid

I would take a look at the /Volumes directory on your startup volume. It is supposed to contain only "mount points" of other volumes, with icons that look like aliases. Sometimes, though, a real folder can mistakenly get created there. If /Volumes contains a "ghost" folder with the same name as a real volume, then the system might be unable to mount the real volume without changing the name of the mount point by adding a number to it. Such ghost folders can also waste a lot of disk space.

/Volumes is a hidden folder, but it's easy to peek into it:

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

You should see only alias icons there. Do you also see any folders which are NOT aliases? In particular, do you see a folder icon named "Storage HD" as well as an alias icon named "Storage HD 1"?

If so, then the "Storage HD 1" alias icon represents the real volume, and the "Storage HD" folder is a "ghost". Ghost folders should normally be deleted, but in your situation it may not yet be safe to do so.

My home folder is located on this drive, and I had to remap it to reflect the new mount point name.

If you do find a "Storage HD" ghost folder, delete it, and then reboot, the Storage HD volume should correctly mount at /Volumes/Storage HD the next time, which is what you ultimately want. However your user account might not be able to find its home folder until you re-correct the path to it. I would create an additional "normal" admin user account, with its home folder on the startup drive, before trying to change anything.

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Answer 2

Jul 12, 2010 11:33 AM in response to jsd2

I managed to do it. However I screwed up along the way, so I had to log in to root and reset the home folder from there. As you said, there was a ghost folder in /Volumes. I deleted it (with some interesting consequences along the way--I could not log in to my account). I logged in as root and reset the home folder for my user account accordingly.

Thank you so much, jsd2!

Hope this thread can serv as a pointer for others experiencing the same.

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Answer 3

jsd2

Level 5

6,245 points

Jul 12, 2010 12:25 PM in response to Passionless Cupid

Glad it got fixed! 🙂

I deleted it (with some interesting consequences along the way--I could not log in to my account).

Yes, I had tried to warn you about that - maybe I wasn't very clear. It is why I had suggested establishing a different admin account first, thinking that you could use it to safely reset the Home path for the main account when you deleted the "ghost" folder. Since the root account had been enabled and was available for a rescue, all turned out fine anyway.

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