External harddrive changes name sometimes

Question

I have bought a new external harddrive to use with my Macbook Air running OSX 10.8.2. I renamed the device to "750GB External" and started using it, for example to store some photos which I edit with Picasa. This worked fine for about a week. Suddenly this morning when I plugged in the drive, Picasa could not find any of my photos, because the device now have the name "750GB External 1".

The drive has format: "Windows NT Filesystem" which I guess is standard NTFS. Since I would like to use this drive for Windows computers as well, I do not want to partition this to HFS+. Is there a way to make sure the harddrive will always get mounted with the same name?

Answer 1

If your hard drive mounted with a "1" at the end, that means the system was somehow holding onto the volume before you had plugged it in again, making it think another volume with the same name was plugged in. Since it can't give an identical path to two items, OS X will add a "1" to the end (which shouldn't be permanent).

As far as the NTFS question goes, I recommend reformatting your drive in a FAT format. If you are sharing with WinXP, use FAT-32. If you are sharing with Win7, use exFAT. Be sure to backup all data first as the reformat will wipe the drive. NTFS is read-only on a Mac which has obvious limitations for you.