All Sorts of Drive Setup Questions

[Hrothgar]

I have a couple of questions that have been bugging me a while about my setup. I've got a 15" mbp, about 2 years old. Running 10.8.5. 2.4 GHz Cor i7.

On my desktop, in the upper right, I've got two hard drive icons. One is titled Macintosh HD. The other is "500 gb Drive alias". They seem to be the same thing when I click on them. can I delete one of these?

Also -- I've got a WD external drive connected to my Airport Extreme (the old, flat kind). But after years of working fine, my computer no longer seems to see it. I don't see it on Finder or in Airport Utilities. I assume this means there is something wrong?

Also, when I check About Mac, Hardware, SATA/SATAExpress I have this:

Volumes:
disk0s1:
Capacity: 209.7 MB (209,715,200 bytes)
BSD Name: disk0s1
Content: EFI
Macintosh HD:
Capacity: 749.3 GB (749,296,615,424 bytes)
Available: 344.37 GB (344,370,847,744 bytes)
Writable: Yes
File System: Journaled HFS+
BSD Name: disk0s2
Mount Point: /
Content: Apple_HFS
Volume UUID: 0FD7B608-6522-397D-BF61-C573FAFC6F1A
Recovery HD:
Capacity: 650 MB (650,002,432 bytes)
BSD Name: disk0s3
Content: Apple_Boot
Volume UUID: F3E647E5-CDEA-3873-890D-9BA1444A22A1

Are there three drives there?

Am I just hopelessly confused? Everything seems to be working fine -- other than that my Time Machine no longer backs up to the WD external drive.

 

[durkkin]

On my desktop, in the upper right, I've got two hard drive icons. One is titled Macintosh HD. The other is "500 gb Drive alias". They seem to be the same thing when I click on them. can I delete one of these?

Delete the alias. Alias is to OS X what shortcut is to Windows. It's just another way of accessing the same drive.

Also -- I've got a WD external drive connected to my Airport Extreme (the old, flat kind). But after years of working fine, my computer no longer seems to see it. I don't see it on Finder or in Airport Utilities. I assume this means there is something wrong?

Definitely something wrong, although hard to say what. Could be the drive failing, could be the Airport failing, could simply be that something knocked the cable loose. Try plugging and unplugging the HDD (if you haven't already) to see if it still lights up and/or the disk spins.

Also, when I check About Mac, Hardware, SATA/SATAExpress I have this:

Volumes:
disk0s1:
Capacity: 209.7 MB (209,715,200 bytes)
BSD Name:disk0s1
Content: EFI

This is your EFI boot partition. It handles startup functions once the EFI firmware on the logic board has passed control to the HDD

Macintosh HD:
Capacity: 749.3 GB (749,296,615,424 bytes)
Available: 344.37 GB (344,370,847,744 bytes)
Writable: Yes
File System: Journaled HFS+
BSD Name: disk0s2
Mount Point: /
Content: Apple_HFS
Volume UUID: 0FD7B608-6522-397D-BF61-C573FAFC6F1A

This is your standard HDD with all of your files on it.

Recovery HD:
Capacity: 650 MB (650,002,432 bytes)
BSD Name: disk0s3
Content: Apple_Boot

And this is just what it sounds like, your recover partition. You can boot to it for low level utilities and troubleshooting in case something starts happening to the rest of the HDD or whatnot.

Are there three drives there?

Just one drive with three partitions. It's kind of like having 3 virtual drives on one physical disk.

 

[Hrothgar]

thank you. great explanation.

On my external hard drive, i plugged it directly to the computer, and now the computer recognizes it. I re-formmated the drive. I took someone else's advice to use Carbon Copy Cloner instead of Mac's Time Machine. I've got the clone running (hard wired to the Mac). Hopefully, when it's done I can plug this drive back into the APX and it will recognize it.

Cheers.