I was playing around with my new external hard drive (using it for backups) tonight and I did some research to figure out if there was a way to hide the drive from finder. In effect, this tip makes the partitions still be mounted (/Volumes/...) but they don't show up on your desktop in Finder (less clutter == better).
The way to make a file/directory/mount point invisible to finder is to set the Invisible flag to true.
Step one is to install the Developer tools. This will install the two applications you need, namely SetFile and GetFileInfo which are located in /Developer/Tools (by default).
Usage:
/Developer/Tools $ /Developer/Tools/GetFileInfo /Volumes/OS\ X\ Backup
directory: "/Volumes/OS X Backup"
attributes: avbstclinmedz
created: 09/12/2006 05:41:26
modified: 12/26/2006 21:39:52
/Developer/Tools $
You'll notice the attributes line, the v is lower case, which means it's set to 0 or "no". This flag is "should this be invisible" so a lower case means make it visible, an upper case means make it invisible.
To hide the drive:
/Developer/Tools $ /Developer/Tools/SetFile -a V /Volumes/OS\ X\ Backup
/Developer/Tools $
Now Run Force Quit and relaunch Finder. All the drives you added the invisible bit to will "disappear" but backup software like SuperDuper! will still be able to see them because they're mounted in /Volumes.
This can also be helpful to hide those Windows XP volumes when you're booted into OS X.
Posted by Perlwizard on December 26, 2006 10:04 PM
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I presume that Finder -> Preferences -> Show these items on the Desktop -> Hard disks was not sufficient for your purposes?
Posted by: Matt Simerson at December 26, 2006 10:24 PMNo, I want my hard drive to show up, just not some mounted drives. The Finder Preferences is an all or nothing setting, where as this is a one-by-one setting.
Posted by: Perlwizard at December 26, 2006 10:43 PM