How hide EFI Partition?
 

Hi guys!

I was trying some things and I execute the comand below:

To erase my EFI partition and install chameleon rc4 again, but now the EFI partition stay on desktop.

There is some way to hide EFI Partition again?

Maybe some obscure diskutil command?

Please help!

UnMount EFi:

umount /Volumes/EFI (If this fails, do umount -f /Volumes/EFI)

rm -rf /Volumes/EFI

Thank you this works, but when I restart the computer the EFI partition appears again on the desktop.

To unmount EFI again...

Start terminal
Code: sudo -s
umount -f /Volumes/EFI
rm -f /Volumes/EFI
killall Finder

When I restart the computer the EFI partition appears again on the desktop.

I think I will you need to reinstall, its not the first time this happen and I dont find a solution.

I think you're EFI partition isn't recognized any more by Mac OSX itself...

If you use a program like iPartition it will be recognized as EFI I think... But the OS itsself doesn't anymore..

I once did have that problem also... But didn't found a real solution also.... :(

The problem is almost certainly that the partition type code for the partition has been changed. You can change it back with any of several utilities. I'm not very familiar with the command-line diskutil program, so I can't help you there. If it's an MBR disk, you could use fdisk to do the job. Unfortunately, I'm not very familiar with the OS X version of fdisk, but with the Linux version of the program, you'd launch fdisk, then use 'p' to view the partitions and identify the one you want to change, then use the 't' command to change the type code. Assuming this is an EFI System partition, the appropriate type code is 0xEF (you usually omit the "0x" part in disk utilities). You'd then type 'w' to write your changes to disk.

If it's a GPT disk, the appropriate code is C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B, but most utilities (understandably) don't accept GUID codes like that directly. You could use my GPT fdisk to do the trick. It works much like Linux fdisk; launch the program, then use 'p' to view your partitions, then use 't' to change the type code. In GPT fdisk, that would be EF00. When finished, use 'w' to write your changes back to disk.

Thanks SRS!

It´s a GPT disk with 2 HFS+ partition + EFI hidden partition, this always happen if I format the EFI partition, I tried to recover from a Norton Ghost image that I had but did not work too.

I will try your program later when I go home.

Yep, it's because after formatting, the partition gets wrong name and type code.
Use a small utility, called "gdisk" (GPT Fdisk), install it and run it from the terminal.
- the "p" switch will print to you various details
- the "v" switch will verify the disk and print out errors, if found

You will see that neither the name of the EFI-partition is "EFI", nor
the type code is "ef00", which is the proper one for a EFI System Partition.

And for the correction, you will need two switches :
- "c" for changing the partitions name
- "t" for changing the type code to "ef00"
- "w" for writing the changes to the disk

Unmount the partition, restart and you'll not see it mounted anymore ;)
Hope this will help you out.

Greetings

P.S. It seems that i have overlooked a user's comment, which already helped :)

A small correction (or at least an elaboration): The partition name, which you correctly say can be changed via the 'c' option in GPT fdisk, is unimportant with respect to whether OS X mounts the partition. That field in the GPT data structure exists to be informative to users. GPT fdisk, GNU Parted, and some other tools (but not Disk Utility) display this field. It can be handy in differentiating different partitions with the same type code but different purposes. For instance, Linux and Windows use the same type code for their native partitions, which can make it hard to tell what's what in a Linux/Windows dual-boot environment. Using the partition name field, you can give each partition a descriptive name, such as "Linux /boot" or "Shared NTFS data." Naming the EFI System partition in this way can be useful, but isn't necessary to keep it from mounting in OS X.