Making a Partition Hidden in Disk Utility

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Making a Partition Hidden in Disk Utility

Hi,

I've recently swapped out a hard drive to a new one, and that new drive didn't have the Recovery HD partition on it. I added it to the hard drive following these steps*, but I would like for the Recovery partition to be hidden so that I don't have to see it on my desktop of in Finder or anything like that.

Does anyone know how I can do this? Thanks!

* Link to instructions I followed: http://macs.about.com/od/usingyourmac/ss/Create-Your-Own-Os-X-Lion-Recovery-Hd-O n-Any-Drive_3.htm

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.5), 2.3 GHz Intel Core i5, 8 GB RAM

Posted on Nov 25, 2012 8:58 PM

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Answer 1

Nov 26, 2012 5:14 AM in response to djl99

You can keep the home-made Recovery partition hidden from Finder in the following steps.

Use Disk Utility and select the partition you want to hide
1. Click the blue info button.
2. Look for the Universal Unique Identifier (UUID) string.
3. Keep this window open.
Open your favorite text editor (not word processor) from the Terminal
1. Use sudo
2. Create the file /etc/fstab
3. Copy and paste the above UUID string into /etc/fstab
4. File Layout:
  1. UUID string of partition to hide
  2. space
  3. none
  4. space
  5. hfs
  6. space
  7. rw,noauto
5. sudo chmod 644 /etc/fstab
6. sudo chown root:wheel /etc/fstab
Reboot

On reboot, you will see a normal desktop. If you want to mount that custom recovery partition, you will need to run Disk Utility, select that Recovery partition, and choose the blue mount button. It will appear on the desktop. If you want it available from boot, rename the /etc/fstab file to /etc/fstab.hidden.

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Answer 2

Nov 26, 2012 6:22 AM in response to djl99

Did you rememebr to turn off Show Every Partition in the debug menu of Disk Utility?

Message was edited by: Frank Caggiano - Also make sure the recovery partition is unmounted in Disk Utility.

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