With a substantial collection of external hard drives, many featuring multiple partitions, The majority of these drives are consistently repurposed and reformatted to accommodate diverse uses.
After joining such a drive, my sole focus is typically on a specific partition; however, Mac’s macOS attempts to mount all intelligible partitions. While I can unmount unnecessary partitions, I’ll more likely choose to mount the ones I require, allowing the system to leave other partitions untouched. While avoiding automount is crucial for maintaining comfort, it is equally important to preserve unmounted file methods, specifically retaining their original integrity – such as keeping the SHA fingerprint unchanged – to prevent accidental data loss.
You can disable automount for specific filesystems by adding an entry to the /etc/fstab file with the noauto option, as shown in the following example: ). Since I joined many external drives with changing UUIDs, I prefer not to name them. vifs After every media partitioning and initialization, and ultimately disentangle /and so on/fstab with numerous noauto Entries often become outdated shortly after being made, requiring regular updates to remain accurate and relevant.
I’m seeking a solution that allows disabling automatic mounting on joining without the need to manually disable each one separately. I might leverage finder or diskutil to dynamically mount the selected file systems according to the prevailing circumstances.
While I’ve consistently held that no-autmount configurations are generally a good idea, there appears to be one notable exception: the Mac’s startup disk. By definition, this disk is essential for the operating system to function properly.
