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I have a firewire enclosure with a 500GB hard drive in it. There are 3 partitions on the hard drive with the following names:

  1. Snow Leopard
  2. NTFS
  3. HFS

However when I run ls /Volumes it gives me this:

HFS     HFS 1     Momentus XT   NTFS        Snow Leopard

Why does this HFS 1 partition appear? Running distil list does not show any sign of a HFS 1 partition:

/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.1 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Momentus XT             499.2 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3
/dev/disk1
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *320.1 GB   disk1
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk1s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Snow Leopard            80.0 GB    disk1s2
   3:                  Apple_HFS HFS                     150.0 GB   disk1s3
   4:       Microsoft Basic Data NTFS                    89.6 GB    disk1s4

I've noticed this behaviour since I set Transmission to download all torrents to /Volumes/HFS/Torrents. Not sure if that has anything to do with it.
I have simply deleted the HFS 1 folder with rm -rf as it was empty, but I'm still wondering where it came from.

1 Answer 1

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/Volumes is really just a regular folder (that OS X happens to use to mount additional volumes). As a result of this, if you have Transmission set to download to /Volumes/HFS/Torrents, but the HFS volume isn't mounted, it will create a regular folder named "HFS" inside /Volumes (and it's just a regular folder on your startup volume). Then, when you connect up the FireWire disk and OS X goes to mount the HFS volume, it looks in /Volumes, notices that the name "HFS" is already taken, and mounts the volume named "HFS" as "/Volumes/HFS 1" to avoid a conflict. (Note: it would do something very similar if you had two volumes named "HFS" mounted.)

In order to fix this, you need to stop Transmission, delete/rename the /Volumes/HFS folder, then dismount and remount the HFS volume, then restart Transmission (and never ever start Transmission when the HFS volume isn't mounted, or this'll happen again).

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