Invisible Volume in OS X
I am currently installing 10.2 on some old Blueberry iMacs. I came accross an error that said something to the effect of “The destination is not within the first 8 GB of the hard disk”. Ok then. After some searching, I find that the solution is to partition the drive, and install the OS on the first partition, which you have partitioned to a size smalled than 8 GB. Apparently, this monster 20 GB aftermarket drive is too much for 10.2 to handle as the OS drive. Now I realize I have seen this error before, many years ago.
After partitioning and installing the OS, I boot the machine and see the two hard drives. Personally, I have no problem with this. I often have 5 or more drives mounted on my desktop. But where this computer is going, this will be an issue for the user. Now I start looking for a solution to hide this second volume. I came accross this solution. But it requires that I install developer tools. I am not going to try and do that on a G3. So I just tried something simple, formatting the volume with a leading period. A leading period will hide a file in UNIX, OS X is built upon UNIX, why not. It works! So if you ever want to make a volume disappear in the finder (VM drive, backup drive, “don’t confuse the old people with two hard drive icons” drive), format with a leading period. You can of course still access the drive via command line.
.Awesome