Any advantage of hiding the win7 parition

[rimmi2002]

I see a lot of people out there want to find out how to hide their win7 parition when dual booting with SL on an retial install. Is there any advantage to hiding the windows parition. I mean is there a reason it should be done for the stability of windows? Please advice. Thanks.

[Gringo Vermelho]

Stability has nothing to do with it, it's just cosmetics.

 

When you install Windows 7 to a clean drive and use the install DVD to format it, you get two partitions, one called 'System Reserved' that boots Windows, and another that holds Windows itself.

 

Since the Windows partition is not bootable, there's no reason to have it appear in the bootloader GUI.

[rimmi2002]

I don't meaning thinking it in chameleon, but hiding it in the actual Mac OS.

[Gringo Vermelho]

Just unmount your drives using Disk Utility or the SLNTFS control panel (google it).

 

I'm seeing this constantly in the logs:

 

NTFS-fs warning (device /dev/disk1s2, pid 54): ntfs_inode_afpinfo_cache(): AFP_AfpInfo data attribute of mft_no 0x24b1e contains invalid data (wrong signature, wrong version, or wrong size), ignoring and using defaults.

 

NTFS-fs warning (device /dev/disk1s3, pid 54): ntfs_inode_afpinfo_cache(): AFP_AfpInfo data attribute of mft_no 0x6da contains invalid data (wrong signature, wrong version, or wrong size), ignoring and using defaults.

 

And so on, all day.

 

Very rarely I'll see this:

NTFS-fs warning (device /dev/disk1s3, pid 430): ntfs_mft_record_sync(): $MFT inode is missing from volume.

NTFS-fs error (device /dev/disk1s3, pid 430): ntfs_inode_sync(): Failed to sync mft_no 0x5 (error 45). Run chkdsk.

 

But my NTFS partitions are mounted non-writeable in OSX so I don't think there's any danger of corruption - I've run chkdsk a few times since discovering those messages in the logs, with no errors reported. This guy has a different story but he mounted his NTFS partitions as writeable:

http://www.efixusers.com/showthread.php?t=693

 

I just came across this, very interesting: http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=security/altds

 

"I see a stream called "AFP_AfpInfo" on a lot of my file, should I worry?

 

Most likely it's ok, this is usually an Apple file system fork like I mentioned at the beginning of this tutorial. AFP stands for Apple Filing Protocol, this stream should contain information like the icon a Mac would use to show the file. The AFP_AfpInfo stream may have been put there when the file was touched by a Macintosh or if the Windows box it was copied from had Services For Macintosh enabled. It's possible that a deviant user could name one of their streams AFP_AfpInfo to try and hide it, but it's not likely because using this name could make in not work as expected when they try to run or open it."

[Gringo Vermelho]

 

I got rid of my constant NTFS error messages by deleting all hidden AFS data streams on my NTFS partitions.

 

First I piped the output of lads.exe to a text file to visually identify all files with AFS data:

lads [path or drive] /S >streams.txt

Then I ran streams.exe from an elevated command prompt and deleted the AFS data:

streams.exe -s -d [path to directory containing files with hidden AFS data]

 

lads.exe can be downloaded here:

http://www.heysoft.de/en/software/lads.php?lang=EN

streams.exe can be downloaded here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinte...s/bb897440.aspx

 

/Edit

 

I found an even easier way today totally by chance - run Hijack This and use the ADS Stream scanner in the misc tools section.

Then tick the boxes next to the files that have AFS data in them and click delete.

I've been using Hijack This for years but I never knew what that was for. Until today I assumed that ADS had something to do with advertising :-)

 

I should probably add here that deleting the AFS data is totally safe and will not do any damage to your files.

 

Also worth noting is that the errors were on files that had been moved between networked OS X and Windows 7 during a backup operation.

[LoneWaffle]

I just simply renamed the volume from within Mac OS X to include a period at the beginning of the name. Just open the Terminal and type:

 

diskutil rename /Volumes/oldname .newname

 

This will cause OS X to not display the drive on the desktop, but it will still be displayed in the Finder sidebar, which is nice because I can still get to the data on my windows volume without it cluttering up my desktop. This will not cause problems for Windows either.