External drive creates "phantom" drives inside built in HD.

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Level 1

35 points

External drive creates "phantom" drives inside built in HD.

Has this happened to anyone else? My External storage drive (Maxtor 250GB One-touch) has somehow created 3-4 other "phantom" drives in my build in HD. Basically when I download something directly into my External, it sometimes will create a separate HD and store it into my internal HD, eating away my free space on the internal. This wouldn't be a problem, however, I can't seem to locate the "fake" drives ANYWHERE! I can access them when attempting to open a file, but there's no way I can delete the drives themselves. I know this sounds really stupid, but somehow it's happened and about 5-10 GBs of my internal HD is being taken up by these "phantom" drives that I can't seem to locate. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance!

PowerBook G4, Mac OS X (10.3.9)

Posted on Oct 29, 2006 11:42 AM

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Answer 1

eww

Level 9

53,052 points

Oct 29, 2006 2:11 PM in response to AdamJR

Hi, Adam, and welcome to Apple Discussions. Your post doesn't sound "stupid", but it sure does sound impossible. Please describe exactly, step by step, what your procedure is for downloading a file and saving it to your external drive, and exactly what leads you to believe there are now multiple "drives" in your internal HD.

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Answer 2

eww

Level 9

53,052 points

Oct 29, 2006 2:43 PM in response to AdamJR

Hi, Adam, and welcome to Apple Discussions. Your post sure does sound strange, but that may only be a product of the way you're describing what you see. Can you identify a particular downloadable file that has behaved this way for you, so I can have a look and download it for myself?

My suspicion is that you're downloading .dmg files, which are disk images. [Read about disk image file formats here.] When you double-click a .dmg file's icon, the file is decompressed into a "virtual disk" that is mounted on your desktop. Double-clicking the icon of that "disk" shows you its contents, just as if it were a floppy disk, CD, hard drive or flash drive. What is really throwing you, however, is the fact that the real disk space occupied by those files on the virtual disk is always on your startup volume, not some other volume such as your external drive. This is true even if the original .dmg file resides on another volume. As the .dmg is expanded, its decompressed contents are written to the startup volume, not to the volume where the .dmg is located.

You can free up that space on your internal drive by "ejecting" the virtual disks that appear on your desktop. And you can then free it up on the external drive by trashing the .dmg files and emptying the Trash. If you try to trash the .dmgs while the virtual disks are still mounted on the desktop, you'll be told they are in use and can't be trashed. You must "eject" the virtual disks first.

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Answer 3

eww

Level 9

53,052 points

Oct 29, 2006 2:45 PM in response to eww

Adam: Ignore the above post. Without realizing I had posted it by mistake, I had a better idea about what was going on and wrote the post below. That's the one to pay attention to.

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Answer 4

AdamJR Author

Level 1

35 points

Oct 29, 2006 3:37 PM in response to eww

I'm very familiar with .dmg files and how the work and it's DEFINITELY not that, so let's see if I can get a better explanation on the situation. Basically, it's like this. I'll download a file from the internet (such as a torrent) and when I go to download the file to the External drive, it somehow creates another HD within my internal drive and simultainiously downloads the files on BOTH drives (the actual external and the newly created "phantom" drive in the internal). So it's like this,...my External Drive is listed as "Video HD". However, now when I download a file to that drive, it is listed as "Video HD 4". The "phantom" drives are all created under "Macintoch HD/Volumes/" and under that are listed "Video HD, Video HD 1, Video HD 2, Video HD 3". Now, when I attempt to locate them by just searching/browsing through my files, they do not show. I know this all sounds impossible, but I'm experiencing it and have only found 1 other person that has had this problem. Hopefully I've explained it better this time around. Thanks for your help, regardless.

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Answer 5

Niel

Level 10

741,911 points

Oct 29, 2006 7:03 PM in response to AdamJR

Disconnect the external drive from your hard disk and then choose Go to Folder from the Finder's Go menu; enter /Volumes/ as the folder's path. When this folder has appeared, move the items that have a name beginning with Video HD to the desktop; do not move any aliases out of this folder. Once only aliases are left in the Volumes folder, reconnect the external drive.

(17340)

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Answer 6

AdamJR Author

Level 1

35 points

Oct 29, 2006 7:58 PM in response to Niel

You're a Genius! I've been trying to get this fixed for some time now and you seem to be the only person that understood what I was talking about. You completely cleared my internal drive and freed up 8 GB of space! Thanks again, you've been a HUGE help!

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