Unmount (or hide) other partitions

[pedz]

I split my hard drive into three partitions. One is the Mac drive. The other two are not used yet.

When I log in, the other two partitions are on my desktop. I can drag them to the unmount and get rid of them. But, is there a way to do this for me at boot time?

If not, I can write a script to do it and stick it in /etc/rc or somewhere like that but I thought I'd ask first.

Thanks,

[darrell888]

The Mac OS X is different from most UNIX/Linux systems. Rather than using the /etc/rc?.d script system it uses a command call launchd. Look at the man page for launchd. It will list the files it uses. It uses the plist files to launch daemons and services.

The launchctl command lets you interact with the launchd. Somewhere in the many plist files, e.g. /System/Library/LaunchDaemon/, is the command that does the automounting of hard drives. You'll need to understand how that works and modify it so it does not attempt to mount your other two partitions. I've only been looking at this for 2 days but it looks like the automounting just mounts everything by default. If your partitions are showing up in /dev then they probably get mounted.

You can also create a /etc/launchd.conf file. This will contain a set of launchctl commands. If you figure out the launchctl command to unmount the partitions this should help.

[jbarley]

in a terminal window type and run

"diskutil list" without the quotes.

from this list, note the name of the drive you want to unmount (in my case it is disk1s3)

Now write yourself a little shell script like this
--------------------
#!/bin/bash
diskutil umount disk1s3
--------------------
save it as a text file with a name such as "unmount.sh"
finally to make it executable
in a Terminal window type
chmod +x unmount.sh.

This leaves you with an tiny app that you can put in your Login Items, this will unmount your drive each time you login.

jb.