How to hide your Bootcamp partition in OSX
Recently I decided I wanted to hide the Bootcamp Partition in OSX to clean up my desktop. I still wanted my Main partition to appear, but didnt really want the bootcamp partition to appear since I never use access it while in OSX. Daniel Moore wrote up a good description on how to do this in 2008 that still mostly works under Snow Leopard.
Note the only thing I did differently here was instead of using the command sudo pico /etc/fstab I used the command sudo vifs instead.
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!
The original post can be found here.
