Mar 31

OS X: Ignore USB Storage device temporarily

3 Comments »

I needed to ignore an USB storage device, or at least disable the automount feature for it, because I wanted the USB device to be available for VirtualBox.

There does not seem to be an device-specific ignore functionality, but in my case it was enough to temporarily unload the USB storage kext:

sudo kextunload /System/Library/Extensions/IOUSBMassStorageClass.kext

This will disable all USB storage media temporarily!

When you are finished using the USB storage device in VirtualBox, shut it down, and then do a

sudo kextload /System/Library/Extensions/IOUSBMassStorageClass.kext

to restore the USB storage functionality.

Posted by Eike Bernhardt

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3 Comments

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  1. Dude says:
    08/19/2010 06:19:23

    Is there a way to disable automounting of USB volumes from the get go (without knowing volume name or UUID) ?

    The reason is that I want to NOT have OS X write any .Trash and .Whatever files onto a certain disk which I’m only going to use for reading (this is useful when trying to extract data from a broken disk where any writes will likely cause more trouble)

  2. Eike Bernhardt says:
    08/19/2010 10:03:52

    You could try using http://github.com/aburgh/Disk-Arbitrator/ which should do exactly what you need:

    "Disk Arbitrator is Mac OS X forensic utility designed to help the user ensure correct forensic procedures are followed during imaging of a disk device."

  3. Dude says:
    08/21/2010 08:14:12

    Found Disk-Arbitrator right after I posted the above and was going to come back to update, but didn’t get around to it. It’s perfect! Exactly what I wanted.

    Cheers!

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