Hiding a Partition in OS X Lion

The iMac in my office has an almost dead internal disk, so I am using an external disk and would like to hide the disk whenever I boot the system.

I can’t really take credit for this, as I found the general idea of hiding the partition on www.radiotope.com. Reading the article and its comments, I cam to this (maybe) streamlined version.

First we need the UUID of the drive we want to hide and the easiest method seems to be to use the Disk Utility.

After starting the Disk Utility, click on the hardisk/partition you want to hide and click the info button on the toolbar.

The information you need is the “Universal Unique Identifier” – select it with your mouse and copy it.

Then open a terminal window (iTerm 2 is a brilliant alternative to the native terminal client on OS X). Now if you look at the /etc folder, you most likely won’t find the fstab file, ony fstab.hd. It confused me a little, so I did more research and found out that it does not matter. We just create the fstab file.

sudo pico /etc/fstab

Once the editor window opens, enter

UUID=[Your Universal Unique Identifier] none hfs rw,noauto 0 0


Reboot your Mac and the partition is hidden. Wohoo…
Now watch me having fun on the computer:

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