Mac OS external drive not recognized by KM because extra number added to Drive name

Questions & Suggestions
1

Hi all,

Currently using Monterey 12.6.2

I have an external spinning Drive that may be disconnecting from time to time on its own.

Anyway after shutting everything down and rebooting Mac and external Drive it came back ok

The drive shows up in the side bar and desktop with the proper name = BackupDrive

I have a keyboard maestro script that opens a few folders on this drive that currently stopped working.

The script points to a folder...

The actual path = /Volumes/BackupDrive/FolderTest

I went into edit mode and recreated the path with the purple browse button and it came back differently as: /Volumes/BackupDrive 1/FolderTest

So somehow the system has a different added number "1" for this Drive

actual = "BackupDrive"
now = "BackupDrive 1"

I so I am thinking this is something to do with the Mac operating system and would like to fix it so the drive shows up as a real name without the number.

Question: does anyone know how I could update the Mac operating system external volumes list and repair it somehow?

2

Try renaming using the Disk Utility application. (in Utilities folder in your Applications folder).
Of course make sure you are renaming the correct drive. DU should show you all the parameters you need to fiqure out.

1 Like
3

That's the problem you need to fix.

The drive is disconnecting without being unmounted -- the original mount point remains in /Volumes so when the OS remounts the drive it has to create another mount point, /Volumes/BackupDrive 1.

That should be corrected after a restart. That you are still having problems implies that the disk is, once again, disconnecting and remounting. If it is directly attached you might have a software problem -- try restarting in Safe Mode and seeing if it still happens. If it does then the disk is most probably on the way out. If it's a remote volume, I've seen this happen when a network switch or the NAS's NIC is failing.

You might be able to work round this for a while by unmounting the volume, force-unmounting the "broken" mount-point with diskutil unmount force /Volumes/BackupDrive, then re-mounting the volume again. But if your disk is disconnecting then, sooner or later, you will lose data -- and possibly the whole volume...

2 Likes
4

Hi Nige_S - Thanks for the info I will give it a try.

5

I will try this thanks