MacOS – Prevent disk image automount when clicking Finder sidebar

automountdmgmacos

I have been playing around with the View → View Options in Finder and I must have touched something crtitcal because now whenever I click on a folder in Finder it automounts a disk image located on my external hard drive. The image is located in /Volumes/elements/App/myapp.dmg.

If I unplug the external hard drive, everything is back to normal. But when the external hard drive is connected, it happens again.

I could remove the file, but I want to find a better solution.

Edit: It does not matter if I move the dmg to another location (i.e: I move it to /Users/charasoverride/app.dmg), it gets automounted as well.

Update: It does not happen for every folder but it does for sidebar items. (Favourites, Devices, etc.)

Best Answer

I would suggest trying two things. As a disclaimer, I have no idea what could be causing this because it makes no sense. These are just some basic Finder troubleshooting steps:

Suggestion 1:

Open Terminal from /Applications/Utilities
Run the command killall Finder
Log out of your user account and log back in
Try again

Suggestion 2:

Open Finder
Navigate to ~/Library/Preferences
Move the files com.apple.finder.plist and com.apple.finder.plist.lockfile to the Desktop
Log out of your user account and log back in
Try again

If neither of these suggestions work, I don't know what else you could try. Other StackExchangers?

Related Solutions

Prevent other users from ejecting (or even seeing) the mounted disk images

To help make the mounted disk image less visible, you can run the SetFile command to make the volume's directory invisible. This will make the mounted disk image be less-obviously visible in the Finder sidebar for other users. Of course, this makes it less visible to you, too, but you can make an alias in the Finder to where the folder should be for you.

Run SetFile to make the mounted disk image image be invisible in the Finder:

SetFile -a V /Users/gabriele/MyDocs

Open the disk image location in the Finder:

open /Users/gabriele/MyDocs

Make an alias to make it easy for you to open the now-hidden MyDocs. Within the open Finder window, grab the folder icon in the top center where it says "MyDocs" and then drag that while holding down the Option+Command keys and release it on your Desktop, just not to /Users/gabriele, because you will need to rename the alias first, otherwise it will not let you copy it. So rename the dragged-off "MyDoc" to "MyDoc alias", then move it to /Users/gabriele or wherever you like. Now you should have the alias "MyDoc alias" to your hidden MyDoc directory, other users will not see it in the Finder sidebar.

Note: Xcode needs to be installed in order to use SetFile. Additionally, I had to relaunch the Finder on Lion for the mounted disk image to become invisible, try that if you can't get MyDoc to disappear.

Not sure how to prevent ejection, since anyone with access to Disk Utility, the mount command, etc. can see the path to it and un-mount it for you. However, making it invisible does lessen the need to make it un-ejectable, since it will not be in other users' faces in the Finder as an option to eject.

MacOS – Force OS X Finder to always show dimensions of images in sidebar

You might need to re-index the directories on your system by doing the following:

Go to Apple > System Preferences > Spotlight and chose the Privacy tab.
Drag a directory (or an entire volume) into the list, and confirm the action
Remove the directory (or volume) from the list via - it, which will trigger a re-index of the directory or volume.

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