Mac 101: Hide Hard Drives, CDs, etc on your Desktop

@ Doug,

Thanks, but I use my iDisk so I need enabled. If you go to the iDisk tab of the .Mac preference pane you can turn off iDisk Syncing, which will also remove the iDisk icon form your desktop. I then have to remember to sync manually, so it's not an ideal solution. I wish there was a hack to rename the desktop item with period to make it invisible.

@ falconstein,
It means depress the Command key (aka: Apple Key) and the Comma key. It does look like a pause in the sentence.

I don't understand this part: "just type Command-, when Finder is active".

Hey Leonard, that iDisk thing was a royal pain in the tookus for a long time. I just turned off all disk displays in order to get rid of it. That is, until I found a hint (can't remember where). Go the the .Mac pane of System Preferences, and under the Sign In tab, just clear your username and password from their respective fields. Voila, no more iDisk icon on the desktop without having to turn off all disks.

I only have connected drives and CD/DVDs show up on my desktop, I like the clutter free look and it's not that hard to open up a finder window to access the drives on the sidebar. Good tip.

I like to show my CD/ DVDs on my desktop, but selectign the box also brings the iDisk to the dekstop. I don't use the iDisk accept for backing up so I really don't want it there.

I can't use the alias truck since the drives come and go with each new CD/DVD.

Is there a way to disallow or hide just the iDisk?

Fantastic! I was just thinking about that the other day. I have a whole bunch of networked external drives on my desktop that I've been wanted gone, so this is great! Also, I think it is overwhelmingly agreed upon that this is a great series. Even though this is the first bit I've come across that I wasn't aware of, it's a place I send all my newb mac owner friends. Keep it up!

You can easily customise which drives are going to show on the desktop - just make an alias. We use this to let our student users only see their Documents folder. The other handy option you can set in the Finder Preferences is, which folder or volume is displayed when you open a new Finder window. With the Side bar, we found that you mustn't remove the network icon, as this will cause network shares not to show when browsing.

lol, it's surprising to me that some people (even the 'veterans') don't know such simple things about OS X. I poke and prod in all corners of my Mac whenever I'm bored.

It's also possible to drag specific drives, network shares, etc off of the sidebar in the Finder, which is the opposite of this tip, but happens to be what I do. I find using Exposé to access the desktop slightly more convenient than opening a new finder window to access my connected shares/drives. To each her own!

Another longtime user to whom it had never even occurred that this was possible. Hooray!