How to remove duplicate "ghost" network drive on OS X?
Mac OS X mounts drives by default by creating a folder with the name of the drive in /Volumes
and then mounting it at that point (so a drive is normally accessible via /Volumes/NAME_OF_DRIVE
). Mac OS X will append a -#
after the name of a hard drive if multiple drives of that name are mounted. (eg. /Volumes/NAME_OF_DRIVE-1
and /Volumes/NAME_OF_DRIVE-2
, etc.) This will also occur if a folder exists in /Volumes/
by that same name. Even though the mount point has a different name the name of the drive will show correctly in the Finder.
An example of what can cause an erroneous folder:
A script or application that writes a file to /Volumes/ExternalDrive/somefile.txt
or even an application that when checking if a file exists (eg. open last saved document) creates a new document at that location when the hard drive/network share/USB key/etc. is not mounted. The file will exists at /Volumes/ExternalDrive/somefile.txt
meaning the folder /Volumes/ExternalDrive
will exist when you next mount.
Fixing this:
- Ensure all drives have been unmounted - use Disk Utility or
diskutil list
to be sure - Check to see what can be seen in
/Volumes/
- recommended to use the Terminal and usels -laF /Volumes
. There should only be one folder (NAME_OF_STARTUP_DRIVE -> /
) - Delete the remaining folders. (I'd recommend checking the contents first)
Ok, so I first turned off my drive to make sure nothing was deleted.
Then in terminal I typed:
sudo rm -rf Lacie-1
Great news, this works. I turned my drive back on and everything was fine.
I did find the cause however when I tried to do my time machine backup. Time Machine is actually creating this ghost drive for backups. I don't know why.