Preventing macOS from Automounting Your Other Internal Drive at Boot or Startup

 

Automounting internal drive can be useful to help it's users accessing drive without to click mount first. Mount is a process where the operating system trying to connect(register) the driver address of a drive to drvie entries, so later it can read, or displayed on explorer like Finder or nnn.  

But there are several reason user wants macOS not to help them mount other internal drive at boot or startup, e.g. the drive is a windows drive with NTFS file-system. 

MacOS have the ability to read NTFS file system, but the ability to write to it is questionable, because there are several cases where the user occured corrupted drive whent trying to use macOS's write to NTFS method. 

Other method to write to NTFS is using tools like ntfs-3d and macFUSE, but that can also come with risk. So, let's ditch NTFS drive all the way from macOS.

Back to the Title, How to do it? How do I prevent macOS from automounting a drive?

Applications located at /Applications, you can access it using Finder, Launchpad, Spolight, or any similar kind.

1. Open Disk Utility, right click on the drive you want to disable it's automount and select Get Info.

2. There you get information about File System UUID, copy it, then open Terminal

3. Go to /etc by typing at the Terminal cd /etc, there type sudo vifs and type your password.

4. Paste previous copied File System UUID in there and adjust the text to like below

UUID=FILL-WITH-YOUR-UUID-COPY none ntfs rw,noauto

5. Save it, next time you boot, that drive is no longer automounted

That's how you do prevent macOS from automounting your drive. Take a NOTE though, DO NOT add current macOS drive that have APFS/HFS filesystem to the /etc/fstab entry, as it may cause unintended side-effect.

Yes, my drive is not mounted at startup, but I want to mount it, how? go to Disk Utility and right click on the drive and select mount.

My thoughts on filesystem

NTFS is good, if you are using Windows and Windows only devices, because it is optimized efficiently on that Operating System. However there's a good alternative to NTFS that enables drive share(read-write) for Windows and macOS, it's VFAT, an extended version of FAT. We know FAT(FAT32) limited only <4GB file copy but with VFAT that restriction is no more.

What about other filesystem? like EXT? ah you know, that's specialized to Linux as NTFS to Windows or APFS/HFS to macOS. VFAT is OS-agnostic. What about btrfs, zfs for drive share between multiple OSs? Try and let me know.

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