OS X – How to Hide a Partition from the Finder

Go to the Terminal and issue the command:

sudo setfile -a V /Volumes/paritionName

where “partitionName” is the name of the partition or drive that you want to hide. This hides the partition from being seen in the Finder but you can still access it from the terminal such as with scripts.

10.5 Leopard Time Machine – Disable prompt when mounting new drives

Every time you mount a new drive in Leopard you get a prompt from Time Machine asking you if you want to use that drive for backups. You can prevent this prompt from occurring by issuing the following terminal command:

sudo defaults write com.apple.TimeMachine DoNotOfferNewDisksForBackup -bool YES

Time Machine

10.5 Leopard – How to Enable the Root User

Open the Directory Utility application which is located in the Applications | Utilities folder. You may have to unlock the Directory Utility application to make changes. Once it’s unlocked, go to Edit | Enable Root User, and then type in a password for your root user. You can now use the root user, and the ‘Other Users’ option now shows up on the login window.

10.5 Leopard – “Disk error” After Installing Windows Using Boot Camp Assistant

Problem: After running Boot Camp Assistant and doing an initial install of Windows, you get the error message “Press any key to boot from CD. Disk Error. Press any key to restart.” when initially booting into the Windows partition after Windows setup completes. This problem is described in this apple support document: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306504

Solution: You need to actually reformat the Windows partition that Boot Camp created. It will be the parition named “BOOTCAMP”. IMPORTANT: Do not use the option named “Leave the current file system intact (no changes)”. Choose to either format the BOOTCAMP partition as either NTFS or FAT format. If you format the partition in NTFS format, you will not be able to write to the drive while booted into OS X. You will have read-only access to it. However if you choose to format the drive as FAT then you will be able to both read and write to the Windows drive while booted into OS X. The advantage of NTFS is that it gives you finer grain control on file access and there is also a performance improvement.