How to hide and rename and prevent mounting

[Tylerrouse]

I've searched through this site and found a lot of methods for getting rid of the pesky System Reserved partition or renaming it, but after I did a bit of looking around I dug up some really easy guides and figured I'd post a one stop shop for anyone looking to have a clean look to their dual boot hackintosh. If you're like me when I would start up I would have three choices;OSX, Windows, and System Reserved. When you choose Windows you get an error. Choose System reserved and you get Windows and of course OSX loads Mac. I wanted to clean that up. Once you reach OSX you'll find Windows and System Reserved have mounted themselves on your desktop. I wanted to keep the Windows since I use it to store common files like photos and stuff, but you can hide that too if you like. Here's the easiest and quickest way to clean it all up.

Removing non working windows partition at startup
Open your HD>Extra>org.chameleon.Boot.plist
add the following key
<key>Hide Partition</key><string>Windows 7</string>

Rename System Reserved
Open terminal
key diskutil list
you'll need to find your the partition you would like to rename. The first number will be your disk and the second number will be your partition. Ex: disk1 with the second partition being System Reserved would be (1,2). Below I have mine renamed as Windows7 but name yours whatever you like. Keep in mind you can't enter spaces.

Open your HD>Extra>org.chameleon.Boot.plist
add the following key
<key>Rename Partition</key>
<string>hd(1,1) Windows7</string>

Prevent drive from mounting
Open Terminal and type
sudo su (press enter)
nano /etc/rc.local (press enter)
Add the following line
diskutil unmount (drag and drop volume you want unmounted here)
Control-O Enter
Control-X Enter

 

[mld1]

Couple of comments:
The method posted by Going Bald (http://www.tonymacx86.com/mavericks-desktop-support/116422-dual-boot-mavericks.html#post708340) did not work for
me. Thank you for your hint about using the hd() descriptor in the Rename
Partition method. That worked.

A comment about the hd() disk descriptor contents. As suggested by someone
(I did not write down the URL) the disk and partition number revealed by
"diskutil list" is not necessarily correct. It was wrong in my case. The
suggestion was to remove the /Extra/Themes directory (temporarily). The
correct disk data is on the boot screen in this case. For me, "diskutil list"
said my Windows 8.1 NTFS partition was hd(0,2), whereas it was really
hd(1,2) and the System Reserved partition was hd(1,1). Do not forget to put
the Themes directory back into /Extra (and I repaired permissions with
diskutil afterward, but that may not be strictly necessary.)

The last comment is about editing /etc/rc.local:

In my case /etc/rc.local did not exist on my new installation of Mavericks.
Not to worry, when you edit it, it will be created. I used vi, not nano so:

sudo vi /etc/rc.local

I will assume people are familiar with vi in the following so I will not go
into the editing details. If you are not, I suggest nano instead. I added
two lines to /etc/rc.local:

umount /Volumes/Untitled
umount /Volumes/System\ Reserved

If you want to leave one icon on the desktop, do not "umount" that one.

Note that, contrary to your instructions, the command I used was the Unix
command umount. For some reason, probably my error, your instructions did
not work for me in this case. And as I am an old BSD Unix hand, the Unix
commands and vi come naturally.

Lastly, you need to mark /etc/rc.local as executable if it is not already:

sudo chmod +x /etc/rc.local

Hope that helps someone.

 

[Going Bald]

An even easier way to get rid of the System Reserved partition - do not allow it to be created in the first place. This is easy to do when installing Win7/8 - just pre-format the HDD. It is that simple. You can format the entire separate HDD MBR / MSDOS FAT with OS X disk utility and partition as needed/desired provided the HDD is smaller than 2Tb. If over 2 Tb you must format GUID partition tables due to limitations of the FAT32 file system.

Once formatted FAT32, boot the windows installer, click on advanced, click on the HDD partition you want to install on and click on the format button - this reformats the FAT32 to NTFS. Now install Windows to the formatted partition.

You can also use gparted or other favorite disk management tool to format the drive. The key here is an already formatted partition to install Windows on.

 

[mld1]

If I were thinking ahead when I installed Win 8 originally, I would have done that. But the machine in question was built as a Windows Box (TM). Only recently did I buy another disk to install Mavericks (both my machines have same MB, but the CPU in the machine in question is better.) I would never willingly reinstall; the download going from 8.0 to 8.1 took the biggest part of a whole day (busy servers I guess.) So I will just live with what I have. But your point is well taken, and that should probably be the approach taken for new builds that want Windows as an ancillary to the OS X disk/partition, say, just to play games.

Good discussion! I learned something from it, and that is always a positive!

 

[DiRTDOG]

Couple of comments:
The method posted by Going Bald (http://www.tonymacx86.com/mavericks-desktop-support/116422-dual-boot-mavericks.html#post708340) did not work for
me. Thank you for your hint about using the hd() descriptor in the Rename
Partition method. That worked.

A comment about the hd() disk descriptor contents. As suggested by someone
(I did not write down the URL) the disk and partition number revealed by
"diskutil list" is not necessarily correct. It was wrong in my case. The
suggestion was to remove the /Extra/Themes directory (temporarily). The
correct disk data is on the boot screen in this case. For me, "diskutil list"
said my Windows 8.1 NTFS partition was hd(0,2), whereas it was really
hd(1,2) and the System Reserved partition was hd(1,1). Do not forget to put
the Themes directory back into /Extra (and I repaired permissions with
diskutil afterward, but that may not be strictly necessary.)

The last comment is about editing /etc/rc.local:

In my case /etc/rc.local did not exist on my new installation of Mavericks.
Not to worry, when you edit it, it will be created. I used vi, not nano so:

sudo vi /etc/rc.local

I will assume people are familiar with vi in the following so I will not go
into the editing details. If you are not, I suggest nano instead. I added
two lines to /etc/rc.local:

umount /Volumes/Untitled
umount /Volumes/System\ Reserved

If you want to leave one icon on the desktop, do not "umount" that one.

Note that, contrary to your instructions, the command I used was the Unix
command umount. For some reason, probably my error, your instructions did
not work for me in this case. And as I am an old BSD Unix hand, the Unix
commands and vi come naturally.

Lastly, you need to mark /etc/rc.local as executable if it is not already:

sudo chmod +x /etc/rc.local

Hope that helps someone.

Thanks so much for starting this thread. I am a noob to OSX and I dont know terminal at all but I am trying to learn. Mld1 Is there any chance you can write a tutorial to hide the system reserved partition from mounting in Mavericks? The method that Tylerrouse illustrates did not work for me.

Thanks for all the help from everyone!