[tonewheel]

I've installed (2) 1TB hard drives in my Mac Pro. One is the main drive, the second is used as a Time Machine backup. I've relegated my other two hard drives (500GB each) to slots 3 and 4, and use them for occasional file storage.

My question is how can I prevent those (2) 500GB drives from mounting when I start the computer? I rarely need them and when I do I simply mount them with Disk Utility. I would prefer not to have them mounted, wasting electricity and generating heat. Presently, I have to manually eject them. Is that my only solution?

Thanks.

[reader50]

You could move them to an external enclosure or two, then turn the enclosure(s) on only as needed.

[chabig]

Originally Posted by tonewheel 

how can I prevent those (2) 500GB drives from mounting when I start the computer?

I'm sorry. Are you saying that the hard drives automatically mount when the computer wakes from sleep? Or are you actually shutting down and rebooting the computer often? I was of the belief that drives don't automatically mount when waking from sleep.

[Simon]

You can tell the OS not to mount a certain volume at boot time

http://www.macgeekery.com/gspot/2005...ing_partitions

[tonewheel]

Simon, that looks like what I need to do in order to prevent the two disks from booting at startup. However, my prowess does not seem to extend to actually executing this process.

I had no luck navigating around the terminal...diskutil, or making any of the commands "stick". I was able to obtain the UUID's for both disks with Disk Utility.
I apologize in advance, but can you provide a walk-through in lay-terms for me. It would be GREATLY appreciated.

Thanks.

[tonewheel]

Also, after further investigation, many on the boards have reported that there is no more "fstab" in Leopard?