nautilus vs konq

[rikona]

My apologies, in advance, to those who may be offended by asking what
may be newbie questions.

I have a second disk in box1 that was essentially a backup disk from
the previous Mandriva install, and from which I moved data to UB. It's
time to do a backup, and before using a dedicated backup method, I
thought I'd see what happens with a simple copy. Nautius sees the disk
and offered to mount and open it - but it will not let me create a new
folder to copy files into. All 'new folder' locations are grayed out
in nautilus. I tried opening media/[long string] in konq, and konq was
happy to create a folder and do the copy. Why are the 'new folder'
locations all grayed out in Nautilus?

During the copy, using konq, I got a few popups declaring file [some
name, with blacked-out chrs] does not exist, and I had to skip those.
These files were copied before [that's how they got on the current UB
disk]. Why is the file name a problem with this copy, essentially back
to the disk from which they came? Will these files also not be copied
with a dedicated backup method?

The disk is mounted as a long string of chrs. Is there a way to get
nautilus to mount it with a more civilized name? :-) I don't need it
to mount at boot time, which, I presume, would give it a civilized
name. If the disk has a label, can that be used as the name to mount
the disk via nautilus? And, I guess there's always the CLI if nautilus
won't do it. :-)

I have not previously run into the [long string] as a disk reference.
Where does that [long string] come from?

Thanks IA,

  rikona