Drive-ing me insane

Question

Level 1

0 points

Drive-ing me insane

I have 3 external drives connected to my Mac Mini. One is OSX formatted which is just groovy, but the other two are formatted for Windows (NTFS).

Now, when I originally purchased those two (now Windows) drives and connected them to a Windows filesystem, they both came with the factory standard volume name and NTFS partitions.And, connected to a Windows machine, I copied heaps of data/files to both the drives and never needed to worry about them, because Windows always associated the same external drive with the same drive letter.

Now I've replaced my Windows system with a Mac Mini. And the fun begins.

Initially I struggled accessing those Windows formatted drives, or more specifically, managing them (writing, deleting, creating folders), but I then found the Tuxera add-on and all was well. BUT my problem is that in Finder, both drives are mounted as Elements (the default volume name of a Western Digital external hard drive these days). Behind the scenes, one is actaully mounted as "Elements" and the other as "Elements 1". No problem, I can access my files... and I'm ok with that.

However. I've now installed software that indexes the files on the drives... and wouldn't you know it... everytime I reboot my Mac Mini, they switch mount identities for lack of a better word. So what was Elements is now Elements 1, and vice versa. Awesome, so all my indexes are buggered, and ever better everything is now duplicated and just a mess. So, I have to delete the indexes and start again... and again (rebooted), and again (rebooted again) etc.

Problem 1. How do I rename the mount/volume (given it's not a OSX native volume)?

I then thought, if I rename the volume from a Windows machine, when it mounts on the Mac Mini that would solve the problem. I renamed both volumes... and taa-daa... nothing. They still mount as Elements. Why?

Problem 2. How do I clear the mount history, or any information that may have been stored in the cache about the external drives? Surely, it should now be going by the updated external drive name, but it isn't so it must be caching this somewhere.

This is uber frustrating, please if anyone has any advice, I would be most appreciative!

Mac mini, Mac OS X (10.7.3)

Posted on Mar 12, 2012 9:20 AM

Reply

Answer 1

BDAqua

Level 10

250,259 points

Mar 12, 2012 12:22 PM in response to Springrock

Whew, have you tried renaming one on the Mac in Finder or on the Desktop?

I can imagine this Elements 1 thing might really confuse OSX...

In Finder's Menu, select Go menu>Go to Folder, and go to "/volumes". (no quotes)

Volumes is where an alias to your hard drive ("/" at boot) is placed at startup, and where all the "mount points" for auxiliary drives are created for you to access them. This folder is normally hidden from view.

Drives with an extra 1 on the end have a side-effect of mounting a drive with the same name as the system already think exists. Try trashing the duplicates with a 1 or 2 if there are no real files in them, and reboot.

If it does contain data...

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2474

Unless of course it really is that second drive!???

Reply

Answer 2

Springrock Author

Level 1

0 points

Mar 12, 2012 10:04 PM in response to BDAqua

Thanks for the response. I've tried renaming the drives under /Volumes/, but you can't. This is what my /Volumes/ folder looks like:

All the drives there are valid. The first Elements is a photos repository, and the second Elements is music repository. Now, I suspect that because they both have the same volume name, OSX deals with this by adding " 1" behind the scene - which makes sense considering how OSX deals with mounting external media.

But, how do I change this?

I'm not having the issue as described in the KB issue, as they really are two different drives. As you can imagine, the apps I use for catalogueing the drives go haywire when I reboot and the mount points have switched (Elements becomes Elements 1 and Elements 1 becomes Elements). I would have thought the drives would at least mount in the order they are plugged into the USB ports, but this is not the case, so how do I fix the mount order even?

Hope this clarifies the issue?

Reply

Answer 3

BDAqua

Level 10

250,259 points

Mar 12, 2012 10:27 PM in response to Springrock

Have you tried Highlighting one one the desktop, then clicking the name until it highlights & renaming it?

Reply

Answer 4

Eric.

Level 6

12,260 points

Mar 13, 2012 1:39 AM in response to BDAqua

BDAqua wrote:

Have you tried Highlighting one one the desktop, then clicking the name until it highlights & renaming it?

I think that's the way you should do it.

Trying to modify the contents of /Volumes won't do much since those are merely mountpoints, which won't effect the disk label (perhaps?) that whatever service (diskarbitration still?) manages the mountpoints.

If renaming from the Finder/desktop doesn't work, may want to look around at Tuxera to see how to do this. This may be an issue related to how the Tuxera driver/add-on works with NTFS.

Springrock, just for curiosity sake, open Terminal and run the following command:

diskutil list

Post the results.

That's only a read command, it's not going to write or change anything. It going to find and list every disk and their partitions on your system. So for sanity's sake, make sure the problematic drive/partitions are connected, and disconnect anything else.

Reply

Answer 5

Springrock Author

Level 1

0 points

Mar 15, 2012 6:20 AM in response to Eric.

Thanks for both trying to be of assistance. I managed to solve the problem, although not very elegant or in most cases practical.

Tuxera allows you to edit everything on the drive, with the exception of the drive's volume name! Which was really a pain... and hopefully this will be addressed in a future release.

The problem was the fact that both drives had the same volume name, and because its not a native OSX volume, there's nothing you can do about it, and OSX handles it the way it does. Not very open-minded from Apple, not natively support NTFS, especially with more and more companies integrating MacBooks in their organisations. This will have to change if Apple want to continue enjoying the successes they have had in the enterprise.

How I solved the problem?

Through the magic of VMware Fusion. I downloaded the public preview of Windows 8, installed it in a VM, and attached each of the USB disks through to the VM. There I could edit the volume name, and the present it back to OSX. And voila! The volume name change stuck! Did this for the other drive, and low-and-behold, my problem has gone away, and I now have two uniquely named USB drives attached to my Mac!

Thanks again for trying to help... I'm still getting a grip on the more technical aspects of OSX and all suggestions were greatly appreciated.

Reply

Answer 6

BDAqua

Level 10

250,259 points

Mar 15, 2012 12:08 PM in response to Springrock

Great work, thanks for reporting the fix! 🙂

Reply

Answer 7

Jun 12, 2012 6:06 PM in response to Springrock

Sadly, I'm trying to use a Tuxera NTFS volume as a sparse bundle disk image... so there isn't any way to view it under Windows as you did with the external USB volume. When I Command-I to get info on the drive to change the volume name in the Info Window, it crashes the volume mount and unmounts it.

Reply