Deleting ghost/duplicate external drives

I have an occasional issue with my network drive disconnecting from my Mac. I'm not sure what causes the disconnection, when I click 'connect to server' & enter it's smb://# it connects again fine.

Occasionally, either on reconnect or when booting, I will get duplicates of this external drive, resulting in a ghost drive; rendering my external drive inaccessible to my back-up software because it's looking for MEDIA (ghost) and not MEDIA-1 (accessible in finder actual drive)

To try & fix I disconnected all external drive & ran

ls -laF /Volumes

& get

total 0

drwxr-xr-x  5 root wheel 160 28 May 15:59 ./

drwxr-xr-x 22 root admin 704 10 Apr 18:36 ../

d--x--x--x  3 mzzt wheel  96 28 May 01:23 MEDIA/

lrwxr-xr-x  1 root wheel  1 28 May 15:34 Macintosh HD@ -> /

drwxr-xr-x  3 root wheel  96 12 Dec 03:09 com.apple.TimeMachine.localsnapshots/

Next I ran

sudo rm -rf MEDIA 

which doesn't return any error message but doesn't seem to delete the ghost MEDIA drive, as re-running the Volumes check returns the same results.

what should I try next?