Prevent disk auto-mount while logged in

Jul 27, '10 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: tobyvoss

While there are numerous well-documented ways to prevent a hard disk or USB drive from mounting at boot-time, I found only one way (working in 10.6) to prevent newly-connected disks from auto-mounting while logged in.

It is possible to turn off the responsible process:

sudo launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.diskarbitrationd.plist
This has negative repercussions on general ejecting and mounting. Turning diskarbitrationd back on with load instead of unload doesn't solve all problems, either.

So I looked far and wide for a simple GUI tool performing this function; all I found were expensive forensics-toolkits for law enforcement which offer this function on the side.

Then I stumbled upon this gem: github.com/aburgh/Disk-Arbitrator/. Works for systems 10.5 and up, source available, binaries available (in 'Downloads'), all problems solved!

[crarko adds: I tested this, and it works as described. Nice utility, with good documentation.]

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