Strange Shared Drive Problem

I currently have an imac and a mini both connected to the same router. I have an external firewire drive connected to the mini. This drive is shared. I run a usenet binaries program that transfers files to that hard drive at various times throughout the day on the imac. Or that is atleast how it is supposed to work. I am in the process of setting all of this up.

I have been noticing that some of the files that are supposed to be transfered to the external are missing. I looked everywhere and couldn't find them. I then went into terminal and checked out what was going on in my volumes folder. What I found was My external shared drive being listed twice. The second one having a name of shareddrive-1 the dash one obviously not on the other shareddrive in this directory.

The missing files are all alone on this mysterious shareddrive-1. This drive does not show in the finder. I am able to copy the files off this drive and transfer them myself. But this is not how I am wanting this to work.

Any idea why this might be happening? How can I fix this?

 

I have an idea of what's happening now. The drive must not be mounted when the app is trying to write to it. So it just creates a folder called the drive name in my \Volumes then when I come back to the machine and mount the drive it ends up having a 1 at the end...

- Is there anyway to make the drive mount when the machine boots and keep it mounted at all times?

- There has to be a more reliable and efficient way of doing this