How to make a Mac harddrive partition non bootable
Just recently added an SSD drive replacing the optical drive. Carbon Copy the whole partition and now left with 2 bootable drives. How do I make the old partition no longer bootable? I've changed the default boot using Startup Disk utility, but want to make the partition completely non bootable
Thanks
To check whether a disk drive is bootable, open Terminal (in Applications>Utilities) and type (replace /Volumes/SSD
with the folder your disk drive is mounted at):
bless --info /Volumes/SSD/
If the output looks similar to this:
finderinfo[0]: 0 => No Blessed System Folder
finderinfo[1]: 0 => No Blessed System File
finderinfo[2]: 0 => Open-folder linked list empty
finderinfo[3]: 0 => No alternate OS blessed file/folder
finderinfo[4]: 0 => Unused field unset
finderinfo[5]: 0 => No OS 9 + X blessed X folder
64-bit VSDB volume id: 0x844F837C9317318A
your computer won't be able to boot from the drive.
For comparison, this is what the output of a bootable disk drive would look like:
bless --info /
finderinfo[0]: 62 => Blessed System Folder is /System/Library/CoreServices
finderinfo[1]: 327769 => Blessed System File is /System/Library/CoreServices/boot.efi
finderinfo[2]: 0 => Open-folder linked list empty
finderinfo[3]: 0 => No alternate OS blessed file/folder
finderinfo[4]: 0 => Unused field unset
finderinfo[5]: 62 => OS X blessed folder is /System/Library/CoreServices
64-bit VSDB volume id: 0xD9A24BFA7A5E7EDC
The command bless
includes option --unbless
to unset volume bootability (from man bless
):
--unbless directory Use the HFS+ volume mounted at directory and unset any persistent blessed files/directories in the HFS+ Volume Header.
So if you find out in the output above that your drive is bootable, "unbless" it:
sudo bless --unbless /Volumes/SDD/