Mac App Store confused with Dual Boot

It's not an issue but the way the App Store works. It looks for apps on every connected disk volume.

You have to eject it to install them

Instead of unmounting the external drive, you can set it as private in the spotlight preferences. (It should even work if you only set the Applications folder on the external as private).

You're welcome

Hi,

I have just clean installed M.Lion and left my Lion install on another internal partition, and when I opened the Appstore I had a similar issue to what you described. Some of my apps reported to be already installed as the Appstore could see them on the Lion partition.

The steps I took to fix this were as follows:

1) Turn on Spotlight privacy for the Lion partition as described above.

2) Opened terminal and ran the following commands to delete and reset my Spotlight index:

To reset the spotlight index, you should disable indexing of the root volume first:

sudo mdutil -i off

Then delete the Spotlight index:

sudo rm -R /.Spotlight-v100

Then reset the data cache for your Mac’s hard drive:

sudo mdutil -E /

To force Spotlight to immediately start re-indexing your hard drive (this might take a few hours and is probably best left to run overnight), enter this command:

sudo mdutil -i on /

3) Reboot.

There are probably other ways to do this without using the Terminal command line, however I wanted to be sure the Spotlight index was gone/reset.

Hope this helps.

I had the same problem, having 2 internal SSD's, one with Snow Leopard, and one with Mountain Lion in my MacPro.

The problem is 2-ways: also updating apps on the Snow Leopard drive is a problem. So tinkering with Spotlight is not an option, I want both volumes searchable in Spotlight.

My solution: in Disk Utility, with one click you can unmount/deactive a volume. Then open App Store, install your apps, then mount/activate the volume again in Disk Utility. Two clicks and solved.

I think this is a flaw in the App Store, and have sent a message to Apple:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

You can automate this quite easily with a little command line work.

Like you said, you need to prevent the paritions that are not being used from mounting on boot.

I have 4 drives, 2 Mountain Lion installs and a Time Machine for each. So, I didn't want them seeing each other.

Check this post, his solution worked great for me.

https://gist.github.com/threebytesfull/968327

The terminal command you can use to edit /etc/fstab is,

sudo vifs