I made a hidden drive, now I can't find it...

[LastZion]

Help please. I created a hidden and password protected partition in disk utility, but can't remember where I stored it on my Mac.
I am trying to find it to move it to my new Mac - but I can't located it...

I have tried to use terminal:

sudo SetFile -a V /Volumes/"Drive Name" && killall Finder

and

% diskutil list

I can't seem to find it anywhere.

I also did "command, shift "."" to show all and can't find it.

It is a small 3.5gig partition on a 500 gig hard drive.

I have no idea what folder I put it in either... 🙄

Any other ideas?

 

[splifingate]

Good job!

 

[LastZion]

Thanks! I achieved my goal of hiding it.
My intention wasn’t to hide it. It was just to have it password protected. But now I can’t find it… 🙃

 

[chown33]

If 'diskutil list' doesn't show it, then it's most likely not really a partition. It's more likely that you made a Disk Image in Disk Utility.

When mounted (attached), a Disk Image works almost exactly like a partition. It has a mount point in /Volumes, it has its own path, and it can have its own format (HFS+, APFS, ExFAT) and encryption options (enabled, key, etc.).

I'd start with a Spotlight search for whatever you named it, which is typically the same as the "Drive Name" you showed. If that has lots of hits, limit the search by only looking for disk images. You can make a Smart Folder and progressively improve its search criteria.

Another criterion you might use to limit the search is the size: 3.5GB. I recommend using a range, like more than 3GB and less than 4GB.

Depending on what type of disk image it is, the size criterion may be useless. A sparse-bundle actually consists of a folder with multiple 8MB "band" files (or maybe other sizes). I don't know how this would be represented to Spotlight searches. It it was a sparse-bundle, and Spotlight looks inside the bundle, then maybe searching for the name of one of the band-files would work. If you don't know what name to use, create a new test sparse-bundle in Disk Utility, and try different search criteria on that one.

You can discover band-file names by right-clicking on the test sparse-bundle and choosing "Show Package Contents" (or whatever that action might now be called).

 

[splifingate]

ha! Do you remember your password?

Open Terminal (and depending on your Account status):

$ diskutil list

or

# diskutil list

I don't have any encrypted disks/partitions, but diskutil will probably be your ultimate source for drilling-down into such things.

 

[chown33]

I thought of another search criterion you might find useful: File Visibility.

You'll probably have to add it to the list of available search criteria, but then you could do a search for just invisible items. This assumes that you made the disk-image file (or bundle) invisible (hidden), and not just the mounted disk volume.

Here's a summary of how to manage search criteria:

Narrow your search results on Mac

On your Mac, focus your Spotlight and Finder searches to narrow results by specifying criteria and attributes, or performing Boolean queries.

support.apple.com

The relevant part, bold added:

Click the far-left pop-up menu, then choose or add search criteria.

For example, to search for only a certain type of item instead of all items, choose Kind. Or to search for any item whose name contains a particular word or phrase, choose Name.

To add criteria, choose Other, then select each attribute you want to add. For example, to search copyright information, select Copyright in the list of attributes, then click OK.

 

[NoBoMac]

What @chown33 wrote.

Plus another thing to check as believe can hide a dmg via chflags command (ala how Library folder in home account is hidden by default): want to do a find command on the volume you think you put the dmg. From a Terminal:

cd /Volumes/myvolumenamehere
find . -type f -name '*.dmg'

Terminal/z-shell will not hide the file vs Finder will respect the hidden flag.

EDIT: basically what @chown33 said one back (posts crossed in the ether).

 

[LastZion]

YES ! You guys got it, thank you @chown33 and @NoBoMac

Appreciate you guys!

 

[macnavarra]

May help :
Boot in internet recovery mode , Recovery OS.
open terminal
Csrutil disable
sudo SetFile -a V /Volumes/"Macintosh HD" && killall Finder

...

DiskDrill ?

 

[thosmatthews]

Just here to say best post title ever.

Glad you found it!

 

[richmlow]

YES ! You guys got it, thank you @chown33 and @NoBoMac

Appreciate you guys!

Hello LastZion,


I'm glad that you were able to locate your hidden partition with the help of the MacRumors community!

Might I suggest that you don't "hide" partitions in the future?! Data security should not be based on obscurity (Kerckhoff's principle).


All the best,
richmlow