Can I rename external drive after migrating data?

[Scott--]

I have a 1TB Lacie external HD running off a mac mini server. I want to migrate the data on the 1TB Lacie to a newer 3TB Lacie external drive. No problem, I can just drag and drop the data.

My issue is that I would like to be able to use the files on the new 3TB Lacie without having the image links, etc. broken in thousands of Indesign files. (I also want to remove the old 1TB altogether)

Is there a way to move the data from the 1TB drive to the 3TB drive; then remove the 1TB drive from the network; then rename the 3TB drive after the old one, thus tricking all my i Macs into thinking that all those links aren't broken?

The obvious direct approach did not work (Simply renaming the new drive after temporarily removing the old one). When I attempted to access the new 3TB Hd from one of the iMacs, I could not mount it. The error message was along the lines of "...the original item for [name of drive] could not be found." (To further confound me, when I changed the name of the new drive back to the original name, I got the same error message. I've since erased it and am ready to start over and try again)

My final goal is to get all the data moved from the 1TB to a newer 3TB and then introduce another 3TB as a time machine drive, but I can't get past the roadblock.

 

[casperes1996]

Well, I'm not sure it'd fix the files being located, but you could rename the volume in the GUID partitioning table manually, using GDISK. Though beware that screw ups can result in loss of the partitioning table.

 

[Longkeg]

Is the new drive formatted the same as the old one? I did exactly what you describe when my Plex library got too big for the old 1TB drive. I simply copied all the files from the old drive to a new 5TB drive and gave the new drive the same name as the old one. Plex never knew the difference and it has performed perfectly ever since.

 

[Scott--]

Ok, now we might be getting somewhere. Disk utility is telling me... (I, personally, did not set this disk up years ago).. that the 1TB external disk is a striped RAID set? Two equal partitions 499.76GB each? I thought a RAID was multiple disks, not partitions. The new 3TB has no partitions. Could this be causing my problems?

 

[casperes1996]

Ok, now we might be getting somewhere. Disk utility is telling me... (I, personally, did not set this disk up years ago).. that the 1TB external disk is a striped RAID set? Two equal partitions 499.76GB each? I thought a RAID was multiple disks, not partitions. The new 3TB has no partitions. Could this be causing my problems?

At least with spinning hard drives, it is quite a bad idea to set up one disk as a RAID with partitions, but it's certainly possible. It's stupid though, since RAID typically increases sequential performance, but will make it worse if done with partitions of a single drive.

So whilst it's a bad setup, it's a possible setup.

i don't personally think it should make a difference to the file system though, but maybe?- I would think if it's the same file format, the rest should be transparrent to the apps though

 

[BrianBaughn]

I've done the rename of a drive as described and it works...but I think it may depend on the application.