Show/Hide only specific hard drives on desktop and/or sidebar

finder hard-drive desktop

Is it possible to show only specific hard drives on the desktop? I have a MacPro tower (3,1) with 3 drives. The boot drive is running El Cap, but there is a legacy boot drive that I would like to keep live, but mostly I don't want users to access it. Can I put the El Cap boot drive on the desktop somehow, but leave off the legacy drive? Does not seem possible in the GUI, or by directly writing to the com.apple.finder plist. Anyone have any tricks?


You can use the chflags command to hide a drive icon from the desktop:

chflags hidden /Volumes/Hide\ Me

Then, relaunch the Finder by option-right-clicking it in the Dock and choosing Relaunch.

To restore visibility of an item, use chflags nohidden instead.

Of note, this won't hide the icon from the sidebar, only from the desktop and Finder folder listings.


chflags will cause issues in Mojave and higher (even after enabling Full Disk Access). Alternative:

sudo SetFile -a V /Volumes/Hide\ Me
killall Finder

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