MacBookPro and External Drive quirks...

[ronin2046]

Not sure if I'm posting in the right thread, but here goes:

I have a MacBook Pro connected to a LaCie external hard drive.

The hard drive shows up as, let's say "External 1", but the hard drive is labelled "External".

I noticed this happened after using uTorrent. I set the download location to the external hard drive. One day I did not have the external connected, and started up uTorrent. It appeared to have created a virtual directory for the same download location, but I could not locate it in the finder.

Now, when I use my Sony PS3 to search for media, via MediaLink, two versions of the external drive appear in the list, "External" and "External"

My question is how to eliminate this so-called virtual/phantom drive from appearing? I want my external to read as "External" not "External 1" in the finder.

Please advise.

[LBLBLB]

Same problem here. Just started using uTorrent about a month ago (so much less bulky than Vuze) but noticed this happening.

Any solution(s) yet?

btw, you can see the "phantom" files by right clicking in uTorrent and "Show in Finder". I have also find they seem to randomly disappear into the Trash, whence they can be rescued.

[geoffreak]

This happens when a program is writing to an external device becomes disconnected. The Unix file system will keep the "fake" folder that exists to write to the external drive to allow the program to continue writing data and not crash. When your drive gets plugged in next, the Unix file system will automatically add a "1" to the end of the name to avoid name collisions.

Fixing this is simple. I would recommend downloading and running FileZilla as it allows you to do things that Finder cannot without resulting in the command line interface of Terminal.

In FileZilla, navigate to /Volumes, find the external drive name without the "1" at the end, and delete it. That's it. Next time your external is plugged in, it won't take on the "1".