- Mac os disk utility command line unmount partitions manual#
- Mac os disk utility command line unmount partitions software#
- Mac os disk utility command line unmount partitions Offline#
What I finally found was the undocumented disktool command. Thus, doing a device-level mount/unmount of volume does the trick at the BSD layer, but not for the Finder. My guess is that the Finder or some other abstraction layer needs to syncrhonize certain data structures on the volumes it sees. And while this does appear to work, the problem is that it seems to confuse the Finder.
Mac os disk utility command line unmount partitions software#
The nice thing about this method is that it relies on standard user-level tools and doesn't require modifying any files that may confuse or break things with later Apple Software Updates. So if you tried to remove a certain volume/partition from the Finder, it would happliy comply, and eject any other partitions on the same device as well!Īnother line of reasoning would be to issue an unmount /Volume/unwantedvolume on startup/login. The problem is that the Finder's idea of unmounting a filesystem is to eject the device. At this point, one might consider simply using the Finder to eject the unwanted volume. Nevertheless, it's presented here in hopes that it could provide the solution someone is looking for and that others may be able to fill in the gaps.Īs the above-mentioned FAQ notes, the next best thing is to leave autodiskmount alone and explicitly unmount any unwanted volume instead. NOTE: The discussion behind this tip is kinda long and hasn't been extensively researched. Read the rest of the article for the solution and more discussion on the question of unmounting just one partition of a volume. Disabling this daemon is probably not a good idea either, even though doing so would probably have allowed traditional methods (such as customizing /etc/fstab) to do the trick. At present, there doesn't appear to be any way to modify this behavior. Apparently the autodiskmountd daemon will attempt to mount any available filesystems it finds at startup. The idea was to have it invisible (unmounted) to the OS, so that apps and other users couldn't modify what I had stored there, unless specifically called for (mounted).Īccording to The OpenDarwin FAQ, you can't pick and choose which volumes are mounted and which are not.
Mac os disk utility command line unmount partitions Offline#
I wanted to set up a specific partition as an offline volume where I could keep a backup of certain files. If your drive is sound you can simply reformat and move on, if not, well then at least you have your data.I was trying to find a way to prevent certain volumes (partitions, in my case) from automatically mounting on startup/login. Note: this program does not repair your partitions, it just extracts data, but it is very good at doing this. If you deal with lots of drives or are an admin, this program (which I had never heard of) should be an essential part of your toolkit. I have since rescued several friends drives. This little genius program saved most of the data on the drive and managed to save all of the data on a firewire drive I had given up for dead over a year ago. After a quote for $700 + a new drive from drive savers I was about to give up. I recently had a disk with damaged partitions that I thought was beyond repair (or beyond expensive data recovery service repair). Norton and Disk Warrior are virtually useless against many types of partition damage and force-mounting a damaged partition in the terminal is often an exercise in frustration. I copied the data to a safe location from the command line with ditto, then erased and restored the drive partition. It took a while for the Finder to recognise the mount, but it did so eventually. That's it! If the mount is successful, you should be able to see the partition. Then all you need to do is to type the following in terminal: % sudo mkdir /Volumes/broken % sudo mount -t hfs /dev/disk1s12 /Volumes/broken The first line creates the mount point the second line mounts the drive - you should substitute for the correct device for /dev/disk1s12, of course. You can probably guess by typing df in terminal and looking for the next or missing device in the listed sequence. In my case it was on an external firewire drive ( /dev/disk1s12). and it worked!įirst you need to know the filesytem device for the drive.
Mac os disk utility command line unmount partitions manual#
Before this, though, I thought it was worth forcing a manual mount. I don't have Norton or other disk utilities, so I was almost resigned to the idea that the data was gone and I was about to re-format the partition. Running Disk Utility or fsck_hfs from the command line couldn't fix the problem, and the OS refused to mount the partition. I recently ran into a problem with a partition on one of my drives that reported a bad block. This tip comes with no guarantees, but should be worth a try given the usage circumstances.