10.5: Keep Boot Camp partitions off the desktop

Sep 15, '08 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: tom larkin

I wanted to prevent the Boot Camp partition from showing up on my user's destkop, while not preventing other mounted disks from showing there. I had tried editing the /etc/fstab file, but ran into glitches when putting that into an image (OS X and Windows XP) and mass-duplicating it for my 6,000 MacBook users. I then noticed that Boot Camp would pick up what the volume's name was in Windows, and name it in OS X accordingly. So I simply put a dot in front of the name while booted into Windows, and rebooted into OS X.

After doing this, the partition no longer shows the hard drive icon on the desktop. It doesn't hide the partition from Finder windows, but it does not show it on the desktop. It was a quick and dirty solution that also worked with the image I created. I believe this only works in the newest version of Boot Camp.

[robg adds: I've marked this one 10.5-only for now; if you've got Boot Camp in 10.4 and can test it, please post in the comments.]

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