1

Something wacky went down when trying to clone a drive and now I can't access 'Macintosh HD'. OS is on separate SSD, User home folder is on 'Macintosh HD' by itself but it appears empty in Finder. My User account can't log in properly as it can't access the home folder so creates new home folder on my SSD. 'ls' in terminal shows files as they are but curiously there are two mount points for the 1 partition in '/Volumes', 'Macintosh HD' and 'Macintosh HD 1'. 'distil list' however definily only shows 1 partition with that name so I don't know where the extra mount is coming from???

1 Answer 1

3

This can happen for a number of reasons, but is usually due to an incorrect unmount. This happens to me a lot with a certain flash drive for no apparent reason — I eject the drive, and it ejects successfully, and next time I plug it in, it seems fine except for certain programs see it as a completely different drive.

Once this occurs, in /Volumes there is a folder with type 'Folder' called the name of the drive, and a folder with type 'Volume' that is called the name of the volume with an appended 1. Consequently, software trying to access the drive sees it as a different drive, accessible at a different path, and software attempting to access files on a certain path fail to do so, because although the drive appears to be mounted, it's not, and /Volumes/original-name/ is just an empty folder, with the actual volume now at /Volumes/original-name 1/.

To fix it, eject the drive, which removes the original-name 1 volume, then run:

sudo rm -rf /Volumes/original-name/
1
  • 2
    That certainly appears to be what's happening. In my case I listed the directories of both mount points in terminal to find out which was the 'real' one. Then I used 'sudo rm' to remove the impostor, and rebooted. That fixed the multiple mount points but the drive still appeared empty and I still couldn't log into that user account. The final piece of the puzzle was that somehow the hidden flag had been set on the home folder which I unset with 'chflags no hidden /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/<home>'. Used Batchmod to fix bodged permissions (diskuitl won't do it as its no on the boot volume).
    – TijuanaKez
    Nov 26, 2013 at 8:47

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .