How can I remove the Recovery HD from my desktop?

Lion creates a Recovery HD during installation. If you truly wish to rid yourself of it then you need to repartition the drive (not just reformat) and then install Lion from scratch. This would require reinstalling Snow Leopard if you upgraded to Lion or using the Lion Internet Recovery network installation if you have a new model supporting the network installation.

Just a guess here...

Did you use the following command in Terminal to allow showing the Recovery HD in Disk Utilities (Debug -> Show All Partitions) and then have it mounted in Disk Utilities? If so, unmount the Recovery HD in Disk Utilities and unshow all partitions then change the value of '1' to '0' in the Terminal command (run it again) so you don't accidently show and mount it again. Or just unmount Recovery HD in Disk Utiliies and it shouldn't show on the desktop when you have 'Hard Disks' selected in Finder / Preferences / General 'Show on Desktop'.

defaults write com.apple.DiskUtility DUDebugMenuEnabled 1

See this article Hiding a Partition in OS X Lion | Michael Grunewalder

Did you also unmount the volume with Disk Utility or the Terminal? And, you need to restart.

jtpollard wrote:

Adding the disk's ID to /etc/fstab with the noauto option - does nothing!

Put fstab back the way it was.

For some reason, I have an icon for the Recovery HD on my desktop, and try as I might I can't get rid of it!

What are the results of the following command?

'sudo diskutil list'

Look for the recovery partition. Does it say that its type is 'Apple_HFS', or 'Apple_Boot'?

To change it to 'Apple_Boot':

'sudo asr adjust --target /dev/disk0s3 -settype "Apple_Boot" '

Replace 'disk0s3' with whatever the recovery partition actually is.

Then do the 'diskutil list' again and verify the type changed.

W A R N I N G: You can erase your data when you start playing with this sort of thing. Do at your own risk.

Thanks - that worked - I "cloned" my recovery partition onto my second internal hard drive - and then will be setting up RAID1 on the primary bnoot partition - but figured it woudl be good to have a second hidden Recovery Partition ont he second drive - just in case - then again with 50Mbps donwload speed it doesn't take long to download a Mac OS X Install.

Note for using the diskutil appleRAID command - the partitions that you mirror have to be the same size (or at least the second member added has to be at least as big as the existing member).

Thank you Mark 😁 Changing the target from Apple_HFS to Apple_Boot has made it disappear from my desktop.

Thank you, that resolved my problem.

I mistakenly "reapired" Recovery HD with Disk Utility, and that led to Recovery HD showing in Finder after the reboot.

Just make sure to unmount the partition first:

sudo umount /dev/disk0s3

There is a post with directions on how to keep your partition and just change the type. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3642919?tstart=0

Finder/Preferences/General. Uncheck Hard disks and uncheck External disks under "Show these items on the desktop".

Simple is always better