Does anyone know if there's a way to not have a hard drive show up on the desktop? In my case, the Time Machine backup drive sits there. But I really don't need to access it. I'd like to simply hide from view.
Dual 2.8 MacPro / 20" iMac G5 / iPhone 3G,
Mac OS X (10.5.6)
That will remove all of the hard drive icons from the desktop. But is there any way to hide just one? The Time Machine drive icon looks like a disc image; if I eject it can Time Machine still use it?
Okay ... that answers that question. I just ejected my backup drive and TIme Machine couldn't find it. And when I re-mounted the drive I then had to tell Time Machine it was back online. So ejecting it isn't the best solution.
Unfortunately there is no way I ever heard of to pick and choose which drives you want to show on the Desktop: you either get all of them or none of them. The closest thing I've ever come up with to do what you want is turn off all of them, then make aliases to the ones you want to see and put the aliases on the Desktop. Unfortunately this won't help for drives you sometimes mount and sometimes don't...
Francine
Actually, I'll have to retract that: there doesn't appear to be any way to make an alias from a drive. I can make aliases from folders and applications. But for some strange reason, there's no such option for drives. Ah well, I guess I'll just hide them all and use Finder's Go feature, and see if I find that tolerable.
Just open a Finder window, then in the Path toolbar item select the bottom-most item, and you should then have all your drives listed (you can't use the Sidebar for this). Click and hold on the drive you want to make an alias, while pressing BOTH the Command and Option keys, and drag to the Desktop--you will see the little "curly arrow" instead of your regular cursor. Release the mouse button when you get to the place on the Desktop where you want the alias.
Francine
you can add a period to the front of the hard drive's name. this will hide it from Finder and hence from desktop. it will still be available from the sidebar. You can't do it directly from finder because it won't let you but you can do it using Apple script.
paste the following into Script Editor
<pre style="
font-family: Monaco, 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;
font-size: 10px;
margin: 0px;
padding: 5px;
border: 1px solid #000000;
width: 720px;
color: #000000;
background-color: #ADD8E6;
overflow: auto;"
title="this text can be pasted into the Script Editor">
tell application "Finder"
set name of disk "current drive name" to ".current drive name"
quit
delay 1
launch
end tell</pre>
Put the name of the drive instead "current drive name" in the script. keep the quotes. press "run".
After all these years using Macs, there's still so much I don't know....
Both those suggestions are great. I'll use the shortcuts on the desktop; that's all I need. Thanks! I never knew about that key combination for creating a shortcut.
I just realized that if I want to see my hard drives I can simply press Cmd-Opt-C from Finder. That works well too.