04-10-2008, 07:13 PM

After installing Windows XP SP2 Pro on an NTFS partition on my MacBook, I wanted to be able to hide the drive because a drive that I cannot write to does not really do me any good, and I knew I could always mount it manually in Disk Utility if I really needed to look at something. I had tried installing MacFuse and the NTFS -3G drivers to let me write to it, but NTFS -3G does not behave with SIGTERM at shutdown, so it led to ~15 second shutdowns. I also knew that if I needed to write to the partition, I could just drag and drop on VMware Fusion.

So I first tried placing a full stop (period) before the volume name within XP, but that only hid it from the desktop and left ".XP" on my sidebar, which was a useless eyesore. I also tried to use my licensed copy of Mac Pilot to invisify it, but Leopard found it...again!

The answer is to open Terminal and enter "diskutil list". In the identifier, the drive should be listed as something along the lines of "disk0s3". Now type "diskutil info (whatever your drive is listed as)". For me: diskutil info disk0s3. That will list a whole bunch of information about the drive. Look for where it says "Volume UUID" and copy the string.

Next, enter "sudo pico /etc/fstab". Terminal will open an fstab file. This file will let you tell your Mac not to boot a drive. The file should be empty. Enter the following:

UUID= (Insert your drive's exact UUID here) none ntfs ro,noauto 0 0

For FAT32 formatted drives, replace "ntfs" with "msdos". Exit and save with ctrl+x (it will prompt you to save the changes).

Exit Terminal, restart, and the drive should not show up. You can still boot it as a Virtual Machine, and if you need to mount it to access anything from within Mac OS X, just go to Disk Utility, click the grayed-out Boot Camp volume name and mount it.

This is not some crazy new idea or anything, it's the proper way to prevent auto-mounting through OS X's Unix foundations, but it can be hard to find and I thought I'd put it down in writing here. Let me know if you have any questions, comments, or corrections!

08-29-2010, 12:45 PM

awesome this helped a lot!

08-03-2011, 05:31 AM

This was just what I was looking for. For some reason I couldn't get:

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

to hide my Bootcamp partition under OS X Lion. But your solution works.

Thanks!