Selective auto-mount

[Rafael Fischer]

Hello!

 

I'm using a AMD with JaS 10.4.8 and my system has three hard disks, two of them is SATA 160Gb and the remaining is a 40gb IDE Disk where the MacOS is installed. I'm using NTFS-3G+FUSE, my doubt is if is possible o configure which partitions on HD will be mounted on the boot-time, because i have a lot of partitions on a tri-boot system, but, i'm not interested on mount all those units when using MacOS...

 

 

Thanks in advance!

[Rafael Fischer]

Bump!

[hecker]

Sure thing. All you need to do is modify your fstab file entry.

I found this cool article that pretty much wraps it up for ya:

http://www.macgeekery.com/gspot/2005-12/hiding_partitions

 

Here's the article for the impatient:

You need to create an entry in your filesystem table to tell the OS not to mount that specific volume. This is relatively easy.

 

First, we need to uniquely-identify the volume to hide. The name's not good enough (how many "Untitled" CDs have you burned?), we need something more unique. Luckily, every HFS volume has a UUID identifier that we can use for this. This way, renaming the volume will not change this behavior.

 

Using diskutil we can see what the UUID of a volume is. With the disk connected run this:

 

diskutil info /Volumes/[name]

 

Look for the UUID in the output and copy it to the clipboard. Now that we have a UUID for the volume we should create ye olde fstab file. Save something like the following in a new file called /etc/fstab:

 

# Identifier, mount point, fs type, options, dump order, check order

UUID=73853D0B-489C-1C22-0148-62BE288C102F none hfs rw,noauto 0 0

 

Now reboot (for internal drives) or unmount, disconnect, and reconnect the drive (for external drives) and it should not mount the partition we identified. If things don't work, start at the top and try again.

 

And I bet you thought it was a flag somewhere. Well, it used to be in Mac OS 9, but no longer. In Mac OS X, diskarbitrationd is the king. Now, this just changes the automatic behavior. You can still manually mount this disk in Disk Utility or via the command line.

 

Cheers,

 

hecker