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drAlberT
Asked: 2009-08-01 07:16:34 +0800 CST

How to hide a partition on the internal disk on Mac OS X

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I have just connected an external RAID1 enclosure (a Lacie Quadro2) through FireWire800 interface to my iMac 24.

I copied all my internal "Machintosh HD" to the new disk, setted the system to use the external disk as Startup Disk, the volume is named "My HD".

After restarting, I run Disk Utility and resized the internal disk 1st partition to 100GB, then made a new partition of about 500GB, named "TM HD".

Then I configured Time Machine to use "TM HD" and runned it ...

.. all works very very fine, but ...

I'd like to made "Machintosh HD" hidden when the system is started using the external disk ... and eventually have it to be the boot disk if and only if the external HD ("my HD") is not available or not connected in order to avoid unwanted filesystem modification.

Is it possible to tell Mac to not visualize a given partition on the internal disk?

Any idea is wellcome, thanks in advance :)

partition mac-osx mac

5 Answers

  1. You could attach an applescript to your login items that unmounts that volume:

    do shell script "diskutil unmount '/Volumes/Macintosh HD'"
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  2. If you want the disk simply hidden from view in the Finder:

    /usr/bin/SetFile -a V /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD

    You can find more by running SetFile or man SetFile

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  3. You can hide the internal disk using Finder’s preferences (under Finder > Preferences > General). This will hide both the “Macintosh HD” and “TM HD” partitions. The disks are still mounted, so Time Machine keeps working.

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  4. Best Answer

    I'm answering to my question basing on the comment by cOle2 in which he suggest to use fstab.

    I'm giving my own answer as I think it could be nice and useful to do the job with a single shell line, without the need of any external editor (vi, emacs, pico, nano,etc)

    echo "echo \"UUID=$(diskutil info /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/ | grep UUID | awk '{print $3}')  none  hfs  rw,noauto\" >> /etc/fstab" | sudo bash

    This works great and can be simply C&P-ed in the Terminal without customizations.

    Thanks to everyone for the tips given

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  5. Unfortunately in Mojave none of the above worked for me. (SetFile is deprecated):

    /usr/bin/SetFile -- set attributes of files and directories (DEPRECATED)


    However this works:

    • in Disk Utility if you select your main drive (in my case was external hardrive)
    • in the toolbar click the Partition button
    • you will see a graph (pie-chart) listing all partitions
    • click on the one I wanted removed (really small one, called Untitled in my case)
    • click the minus ( - ) button
    • click apply
    • disk utility removed the partition and said "growing partition"
    • one of the other partitions was "grown" and filled the empty space

    I now have got rid of the 9MB "Untitled" partition.

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