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Mint 12: Hide unwanted devices in Nautilus

Friday, February 10th, 2012 | Linux, Tech-savvy

My laptop consists of quite a few partitions, different OSs and file systems. Nautilus displays everything that will be mounted to /media as a device in the places sidebar. This became an annoyance, because I really don’t need to see my Win7 system partition and my old Mint 10 partitions on a regular basis. I tried the easy way: right-click on an item and say “remove” or something – naaat!

I was looking for an easy solution and came across some pretty old forum posts and workarounds that simply don’t work (any more). Here is how I managed to get rid of the unwanted device entries fairly easily: you simply have to explicitly mount the unwanted volumes and use a folder other than /media – basically /mnt will do. This way you don’t have the unwanted file systems listed in Nautilus directly yet can access them easily by navigating to /mnt/mountpoint.

Step by step:

1. open nautilus
2. mount all unwanted files systems by selecting them one after another
3. open a terminal
4. list mounted devices

   nick@mintbox ~ $ mount

5. look for the entries that resemble the unwanted files systems
6. write down the /dev/sdx and type attributes
7. create mountpoints for each device in in /mnt

   nick@mintbox ~ $ sudo mkdir /mnt/exampleMountPoint1 nick@mintbox ~ $ sudo mkdir /mnt/exampleMountPoint2

8. open fstab

   nick@mintbox ~ $ sudo gedit /etc/fstab

9. add a fstab entry for each device (first is a Win NTFS partition, second a ext4 Linux one)

   /dev/sda6 /mnt/exampleMountPoint1 ntfs-3g defaults 0 0 /dev/sda7 /mnt/exampleMountPoint2 ext4 defaults 0 0

That should do the trick.

Tags: devices, mint, nautilus

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