Terminal

How to prevent partitions from mounting when you boot up, log in, or connect drives to your Mac

Joaquim Barbosa ∙ Updated October 17, 2018

With the exception of partitions in unreadable formats and certain hidden partitions such as EFI and Recovery HD, the default behaviour of macOS is to mount all partitions of a drive on boot-up, login, or on connecting an external drive.

Whilst this behaviour is useful for the novice or for those connecting a single USB stick to copy some files, it can become unwieldy and even annoying if you have many multi-partitioned drives attached to your Mac.

For example, my desktop Hackintosh has three internal drives, each with at least two partitions, and one of these drives is not even needed when booted under macOS – it is for Windows 10 and Linux. Add to this a couple of external hard drives with partitions for storage, OS installers and Time Machine backups for other computers, and your desktop and Finder sidebar can begin to look a real mess. It also takes time for the drives to mount on every boot and unmount on sleep or shutdown.

This guide will detail how to ensure only the drives of your choosing mount automatically, leaving the rest unmounted within macOS.

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How to stop the new MacBook Pro from automatically turning on when the lid is open

Christian Zibreg ∙ October 31, 2016

Aside from the marquee Touch Bar feature and other hardware advances, the new MacBook Pro introduces a tweaked boot process where the machine automatically starts up when you open its lid or connect it to power. To avoid forcing users to listen to the startup chime every time they open the lid, Apple's also decided to disable the boot chime on the new notebook by default (you can easily re-enable it).

But what about the mentioned auto-boot features? Unfortunately, Apple does not provide user-facing switches in System Preferences to control the new boot on power and boot on lid capability. With a little help from Terminal and smart folks over at Pingie, you can manually stop the late-2016 MacBook Pro from automatically powering on when you lift the lid or connect it to a power adapter or an external display.

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How to bring back the classic boot chime on the new MacBook Pro

Christian Zibreg ∙ October 31, 2016

The new MacBook Pro has ditched the iconic boot chime that's been a signature part of the Mac startup process over the last 17 years. Pingie discovered that the sound is not gone entirely. Apple's just disabled it and it's possible to bring it back should you want. In this quick tutorial, we'll show you how to re-enable the boot chime on your late-2016 MacBook Pro with a simple Terminal command.

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How to disable the startup tone on your Mac

Anthony Bouchard ∙ Updated September 18, 2018

Whenever you turn on your Mac, you typically hear a startup tone just before your computer boots up. The tone is there to let you know your computer has passed a pre-boot test and its hardware is working properly.

Some people, however, prefer to boot up their computers in silence. If you're one of those people, we'll show you in this tutorial how you can disable the start-up tone on your Mac.

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Hacker demos Flying JB, an iOS 9.2.1 jailbreak of little interest

Sébastien Page ∙ June 12, 2016

Chinese hacker Min Zheng has showed a demo of Flying JB earlier today, a jailbreak for 32-bit devices running iOS 9.2.1 or lower. The video demo shows off an iPhone 5c going through the jailbreak process as well as Mobile Terminal running on the device once jailbroken.

What may sound like exciting news at first is actually nothing to call home about as the limitations and actual usage potential of Flying JB are extremely limited.

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New Mac extension simplifies opening and switching Terminal to the current folder

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated February 5, 2018

A new OS X extension from Hasbrang Productions, the prominent jailbreak community development team, makes it easy to open and switch a new Terminal window to the current working directory, right from the Finder's contextual menu.

Available at no charge on the Mac App Store, the aptly named TermHere installs itself as a Finder file extension, readily accessible from the right-click menu. It works as advertised and is pretty convenient, more so if you use Terminal frequently.

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How to fix Ethernet problems after a recent Mac security update

Anthony Bouchard ∙ Updated February 7, 2017

As my colleague Christian reported on Saturday, some Mac models have been plagued by non-working Ethernet ports after installing a new security update outed by Apple. Although a lot of modern Macs don't even have an Ethernet port, many models still carry it and many people still love using a wired internet connection because it's faster, more reliable, and more secure than a wireless network.

The security update, known as "031-51913 Incompatible Kernel Extension Configuration Data 3.28.1," reportedly blacklists the Broadcom BCM5701 driver used by the Ethernet port that comes standard on many Mac machines.

Fortunately, there's a light at the end of the tunnel for anyone experiencing issues with their Ethernet ports after installing this security update. Apple has issued a support document on Sunday that notes how to fix the problem. In this tutorial, we'll go over the steps to fix the problem yourself.

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