TUAW Tip: Showing Desktop Hard Drives on a case-by-case basis

I'd love to get that script. I have just bought a new mac pro. My plan is to use 2 drives as the system & files, the other two drives as copies of them for backup purposes. If the second set of drives were not visible on the desktop, that would be fine!

HOWEVER: will the system still see them? (i.e show in disk utility or other utilities, be able to be written to etc.)?

Please post where I can download the script! Thanks!

Oh yeah! Couldn't help noticing a firefly dvd in your drive. Thank you! someone else who watches that AWESOME show!

I have desktop display disabled for my volumes, but I can always get them by opening a Finder window and going to the top level. Even if you don't have them in your sidebar, your volumes will show up at the root level. Who needs anything more? Not me.

I created an apple script to hide any disk that you want. I created it to hide my windows partition. I think it will also hide externals as well. It uses the setfile command so you need the developer tools installed. I don't have the apple script with me but if anyone wants it let me know where I can post it so others can download it.

I'd just be happy to have my drives stay where I left them. EVERY TIME I REBOOT. Sheesh.

If you have the Apple Developer Tools installed, you can actually open a Terminal window, and do:

cd /Volumes
/Developer/Tools/SetFile -a V HardDrive

Where 'HardDrive' is the drive you want hidden from Finder. That sets the Invisible file attribute on the mount point, which will make it vanish from the Desktop and so on. I do this to conceal my Windows XP partition on my dual-boot MBP; it does not actually remove the drive, just hides the mount point.

Parallels, the bootloader, etc., all find it fine, as does anything else like Disk Utility or suchnot. :)

Errr, yeah, what Andrew said. ;-)

"how do i rename the windows drive on my desktop? when i try, it doesn't allow it. its not even in the contextual menu. i assume this means it's unwritable or something so how do you do it?"

You must boot into Windows to change the drive name. OS X will not allow you to rename a file to something that begins with "." because it is "reserved by the system."

Not only that, but if your Windows drive is formatted as NTFS, you cannot rename the file from within OS X anyways, since OS X does not have the ability to write to a NTFS formatted drive.

ralph you need to do it in windows, not from os x [os x can't write to ntfs partititons]

niepi,

how do i rename the windows drive on my desktop? when i try, it doesn't allow it. its not even in the contextual menu. i assume this means it's unwritable or something so how do you do it?