How can I tell OSX NOT to mount some of the drives in my computer?

I have a Mac with a Windows drive that I occasionally boot to. Most of the time, I'm using the Mac, and the Windows disk always mounts and shows up on the desktop. I would like to keep it from showing up or prevent it from mounting at all if possible, without affecting the ability to boot to it when I want to. I found an answer on a blog that uses

$ chflags hidden /Volumes/Time\ Machine/

to hide the volumes. I will do that if there's no way to prevent mounting them. Thanks for any answers!

Solution 1:

Create a file /etc/fstab with the following contents.

# fstab
#
# Identifier  mount point  fs type  options1
#
UUID=3CA41C88-3E86-3A39-88CE-9379FF44B6A5 none hfs rw,noauto

The alphabet soup after the = sign can be found with diskutility.

(Fire up DiskUtility, select the disk, right click, More Information Universal ID)

FS tab needs the following ownership and permissions:

bash-3.2# ls -l /etc/fstab
-rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel  71 29 Aug  2011 /etc/fstab

To create the file try this:

sudo nano /etc/fstab

The noauto option causes it to not mount at boot. In a terminal window type man fstab for other options

Not directly applicable to your problem: VirtualBox, VMware, and Parallels can run windows in a virtual machine. VirtualBox allows using a dedicated disk. (Others may, don't know) For applications that are not CPU or graphics intensive, or access the hardware directly this is often good enough. I run MS Access this way. Anything that needs DirectX may have issues or have an unacceptably slow frame rate. Action games don't work well.