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Stop OS X mounting NTFS partition on external drive.

T

Tinlad

macrumors member
Original poster
May 1, 2006
60
0
Nottingham, UK
I have a 250GB external firewire drive hooked up to my MacBook Pro. It has two partitions; one is HFS+ and the other is NTFS for use with XP via Boot Camp.

The NTFS partition is useless to me whilst in OS X, so I was wondering if there's a way to stop it being mounted when I plug in the drive? I've stopped the NTFS partition on my startup disk from being mounted by using a fstab file, but that is only referred to at boot; not when an external drive is connected, so that method doesn't work.

If anyone has any ideas I would appreciate it!

Thanks,

Guy.
 
An ugly solution would be to have a script that identifies and unmounts the NTFS volume constantly running via launchd. A very ugly solution.
 
Tinlad said:
I have a 250GB external firewire drive hooked up to my MacBook Pro. It has two partitions; one is HFS+ and the other is NTFS for use with XP via Boot Camp.

The NTFS partition is useless to me whilst in OS X, so I was wondering if there's a way to stop it being mounted when I plug in the drive? I've stopped the NTFS partition on my startup disk from being mounted by using a fstab file, but that is only referred to at boot; not when an external drive is connected, so that method doesn't work.

If anyone has any ideas I would appreciate it!.
Click to expand...

If you boot from the NTFS partition then the only way to select the NTFS partition in the Startup Disk preference pane is if the partition is mounted.

Anyway, I discussed some of the issues you are asking about in this thread: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/216245/
 
mrichmon: I think you've misunderstood my problem. The NTFS partition on my external drive doesn't contain a Windows installation; it is purely data. I don't boot from it at all. I have already dealt with the NTFS partition on my internal drive.

EDIT: Just realised that it might sound like I have XP installed on the external drive in my original post. Sorry about that. Thanks for trying to help.

yellow: Thanks for the suggestion. It's ugly, as you say, and I think I'd rather have the icon on my desktop than have a script running all the time just looking for it.:)
 
Tinlad said:
yellow: Thanks for the suggestion. It's ugly, as you say, and I think I'd rather have the icon on my desktop than have a script running all the time just looking for it.:)
Click to expand...

Astute observation. The script would be a waste of resources. Probably a minor one, but a waste none-the-less.
 
Excellent! That works. I'd tried using fstab before, but it didn't work. Perhaps I got the syntax wrong or something.:confused:

Anyway, thanks!:)
 
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