What preference file would be corrupted?

[delirious]

I copy the path of a file from most of my Macs in my department, and it reads like so:

/Volumes/COMP/RDE/2008/03_March 2008/98687_RDE_Series_AA_ER/98687_RDE_Series_AA_ER.pdf

but on one Mac, the path reads like so:

/Volumes/COMP-1/RDE/2008/03_March 2008/98687_RDE_Series_AA_ER/98687_RDE_Series_AA_ER.pdf

Why would the volume "COMP" read "COMP-1"?

 

[Mikuro]

There are three likely causes:

1. That Mac has another drive mounted that's named "COMP".
2. That Mac once improperly unmounted that drive, and did not clear the old mount point.
3. Some silly program created a folder named "COMP" in your /Volumes folder. (I've seen this happen when internet apps try to download a file to a location on a volume that is not mounted.)

If it were #1 you probably would've noticed, so I'll assume it's #2 or #3. The solution is simple. First, unmount your COMP volume. Then in the Finder, select "Go To Folder" under the Go menu, and enter "/Volumes". Find the file/folder called "COMP" and move it out. You should be able to safely delete this, but first make sure there's nothing in there you want (in case #3 it will be a folder, and there might be something in there).

After moving that out, the next time you mount your disk it should mount as "COMP".