[MacPC]

Hi,

I have Leopard on my Mac Mini. I also have a external drive attached to it. Everytime I reboot the Mac, the external drive shows up on my desktop. I have to manually unmount it. How can I stop the Mac from mounting it automatically in the first place? Thanks.

[Art Vandelay]

Disconnect it.

[peeb]

Why do you want to do this?

[Krusty]

I'm not sure if you can stop the disks from mounting in the first place (you could have a login item that unmounts it so it is at least automated). Alternately, if you just want to the volume to not appear on the desktop, you can go to Finder->Preferences->General-> and uncheck External disks from what gets shown on the desktop.

[MacPC]

Hi, thanks for the replies.
peeb: "Why do you want to do this?"
I have two partitions on this external drive. One is for backup which I use to back up thoughts on a project. So I want to keep that on the Desktop for convience. But the other partition is for backing up the project daily after the day's work. My co-worker, and even I myself sometime drop the small thoughts on the wrong partition and create version confusion.

Krusty: Yeah, an automated unmount process is fine. Any idea how to do it?

[Hal Itosis]

This worked really well in Tiger:

Hiding Partitions

Haven't tried it in Leopard yet.

[irishgal]

Hi people,

I'm hoping that someone can point me in the right direction as I'm a complete technophobe..

I recently bought a second hand G3 Imac a while ago and wonder if anyone could recommend what type of security software I could install on it as from what I've seen around Dublin most security packages are windows based. Its has 256MB and the processor is a 400Mhz.

Thanks so much in advance.

Irishgal.

[CharlesS]

Drag the drive's Desktop icon to the lower left corner of your desktop. If you're running Leopard, the OS will remember that you put it there, and it will always be in the left, far from the rest of your drive icons, making it very hard to drag things onto it by accident.

[C.A.T.S. CEO]

Originally Posted by irishgal 

Hi people,

I'm hoping that someone can point me in the right direction as I'm a complete technophobe..

I recently bought a second hand G3 Imac a while ago and wonder if anyone could recommend what type of security software I could install on it as from what I've seen around Dublin most security packages are windows based. Its has 256MB and the processor is a 400Mhz.

Thanks so much in advance.

Irishgal.

1. Why don't you post your own thread instead of hijacking this one?
2. You don't need any security software for a Mac, just enable the firewall if you're paranoid.

[MacPC]

Got it! I wrote a one line shell script, put it in the Login Items, that took care on it.

[Hal Itosis]

Originally Posted by MacPC 

Got it! I wrote a one line shell script, put it in the Login Items, that took care on it.

 
How nice for you.

Now... aren't you gonna share that script with the curious reader
[as well as with others who --may be in the same boat you were
and-- might land in this thread while searching for a solution] ?

[MacPC]

But of course. Here's the simple Applescript.

tell application "Finder"
do shell script "diskutil unmount disk2s2"
end tell

disk2s2 should be set to whatever partition you want to unmount. You can find that out by going to Terminal and type -- diskutil list.

Save the script to whereever you want, go to System Preferences->Accounts. Under your user name,
highlight it, you will see two buttons in the right of the pane, click the one that says Login Items, add the script by clicking the + button and check it. Done!

[Art Vandelay]

Even simpler...

do shell script "diskutil unmount \"/Volumes/Name of Hard Drive\""

You don't need the Tell block since the Finder isn't doing anything. Also, you can just use the hard drive name instead of the device name. This example also allows you to use a name with spaces in it.

[TETENAL]

Even more simple:

tell application "Finder" to eject "external disk"

[Art Vandelay]

Even better.

[MacPC]

Hmmmm, I started using:
tell application "Finder" to eject "external disk". Somehow the eject command doesn't do the trick.

this one
do shell script "diskutil unmount \"/Volumes/Name of Hard Drive\""
is cool

While its true that the tell application... is not necessary when in Finder, it's just a good habit to conform with the the style.

[Art Vandelay]

Tetenal's script worked for me.

You don't need a Finder tell block at all for a "do script" command nor is it good style. Shell scripts have nothing to do with the Finder, it is internal to AppleScript.

[TETENAL]

You have to replace the cursive part with the actual name of the external disk (no path). I assumed that was obvious.

[Hal Itosis]

Some methods will work in non-admin accounts... and some won't.