Force an external hard drive to appear as an internal drive

I'm seeking a way to make my external hard drive appear as an internal drive. This drive is permanently hooked up and I don't want its icon on the desktop blending in with whatever temporary external drives I may have hooked up at the moment (and yes, I do want flash drives to always appear on the desktop). It's an OCD affair. Thanks.

iMac, OS X Yosemite (10.10.3), Mid 2011 iMac 27" 3.1ghz i5 12gb

Posted on Jun 17, 2015 4:53 PM

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4 replies

Jun 17, 2015 5:03 PM in response to Niel

Thanks Niel. I immediately see that I was unclear. I'm seeking to eliminate only that drive's icon from the desktop completely. I use the desktop as a sort of inbox so if I see an icon on the desktop, I feel that I should be doing something with it. But I certainly don't want to remove any other external drives from the desktop so disabling Show External Disks on Desktop is not a preferable option.


This is my first permanent external drive as I just eliminated my server. I've scoured the internet to no avail. Thanks again.

Jun 17, 2015 5:19 PM in response to Wunstel

Choose Utilities from the Finder’s Go menu, open the AppleScript Editor, paste the four lines below into it, and run the script:


tell application "Finder" to quit

do shell script "chflags hidden '/Volumes/volumename/'"

delay 2

tell application "Finder" to run


replacing volumename with the drive's name. To undo this, replace hidden with nohidden.


(128863)

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Force an external hard drive to appear as an internal drive

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