May 14, 2009
Hide a BootCamp Windows Partition from the OS X Desktop
After loading Windows 7 RC on my MacBook in BootCamp, I noticed that the partition shows up on the Mac OS desktop. I leave the icons for hard drives on the desktop, but since I don’t use the Windows partition from inside OS X, I was looking for a way to hide it from the desktop.
After digging around on Google a bit, I found a few ways to do it. The easiest of which is to simply log into your Windows environment and rename the C drive to something like .Windows. This works because UNIX- and Linux-based systems assume that any file or folder beginning with a . (period) are meant to be hidden. The advantage to this method is the change doesn’t cause the partition not to be mounted, so it’s still accessible if you want to copy files from the NTFS partition.
Another method, which I came across on Chris Brewer’s Garbage In, Garbage Out blog, uses a command line program from Apple’s developer tools called SetFile to hide the partition. Have a look at the post here: BootCamp: Hide a Windows XP volume on Mac desktop. Keep in mind that to use this method, you will have to install Apple’s Developer Tools, available for download from Apple’s website or from the DVD’s that came with your new Mac.
[...] Hide a BootCamp Windows Partition from the OS X Desktop — Bits of Tech. Kind of cool suggestions. Much easier than other suggestions I have read. From the article: After digging around on Google a bit, I found a few ways to do it. The easiest of which is to simply log into your Windows environment and rename the C drive to something like .Windows. This works because UNIX- and Linux-based systems assume that any file or folder beginning with a . (period) are meant to be hidden. The advantage to this method is the change doesn’t cause the partition not to be mounted, so it’s still accessible if you want to copy files from the NTFS partition. [...]