Reader Gene Dybinski would like to lend his mother a hand. He writes:
Last March I bought a new Power Mac G5, and almost immediately saw an article (on either this site or in the magazine) on how to remove or hide the hard drive icon from the upper right corner of the Desktop. Worked just fine!Now we bought my mother a new 20” Intel iMac, and I can’t remember how to hide the hard drive icon, nor find the article on how to do it. Please help me out here.
Happy to. From the Finder menu choose Preferences and, if it’s not selected, click the General tab in the resulting window. You’ll see the option to show specific items on the Desktop. They include hard disks, CDs, DVDs, and iPods; and connected servers. Simply uncheck the Hard Disk option and the Desktop is HD icon-free. Should you care to, you can remove hard drive icons from the Sidebar as well. Just click the Sidebar tab in this same Preferences window and disable the Hard Disk option here too.
Here’s a little bonus tip: You can go the opposite way and make a hard drive icon (or folder, if you like) appear in even more places than usual. Specifically you can cause a hard drive icon to appear in the toolbar of every Finder window. To do so, just drag the volume’s icon to an open Finder window’s toolbar (the area where the Search field appears). Hold it there for a couple of seconds until you see the green plus sign. Let go of the mouse button and the volume’s icon will appear in the toolbar.
Should you later wish to remove it, just hold down the Command key and drag it out of the toolbar.