Hiding a mounted volume on MacOS

September 5, 2007 By 5 Comments

Quick note here, that’s especially useful to people using BootCamp on their Macs and don’t want their Windows-formatted partition appearing on their desktop. To hide it whenever the Finder starts (it will still be mounted, but not visible on the Finder), open the Terminal and run the following command:

/Developer/Tools/SetFile -a V /Volumes/Untitled

Replace the “Untitled” with whatever the volume name is listed as in /Volumes. Note also, that you will need to have Apple’s Developer Tools installed in order for this to work. It’s free, but a fairly large download. Hope you find this useful!

Filed Under: System Administration
  • http://gigoblog.com Chris Brewer

    Howdy. Apple Developer Tools is included on the second disk of your Mac OS X installation disks…

  • http://www.dracoware.com ryan

    Right, thanks for pointing that out Chris. If you can find your disks, it’s a lot faster than downloading the whole thing from Apple. :)

  • http://www.dracoware.com ryan

    Well, after upgrading to Leopard, not sure if this still works or not. I installed Leopard and my Untitled volume (the Windows partition) appeared on my desktop again. Re-running the command above seems to give a permissions problem. If anyone else has any suggestions, be sure to post!

  • Delete

    You’re right. All those things do not work with Leopard. But heres a simple one: just boot Windows, right-click and select properties of the C: drive or the drive you don’t wanna see in MacOS and give it a name that starts with a dot. Works with XP but I don’t think vista’s different

  • http://www.dracoware.com ryan

    hey, that’s a great idea! It never occurred to me that in the UNIX world, files/folders starting with dot count as “hidden”, but in Windows, they’re ignored. Great tip!