Month: March 2013

Disable “Use this disk?” Time Machine prompt

With a diagnostic OS, you’ll likely find yourself mounting many hard drives – either while NetBooted, or booted from an external hard drive. If Time Machine is not enabled, it will offer to backup to any reasonably-sized hard drive connected to your machine.

To disable this, run this command in the Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.TimeMachine DoNotOfferNewDisksForBackup -bool YES

This will prevent the Time Machine prompts from appearing.

Tested with: 10.5, 10.6, 10.7, 10.8, 10.9, 10.10

Testing the built-in iSight camera

Sometimes, when building a diagnostic OS, you need to optimize for space – you might be trying to fit the OS onto a small USB flash drive, or you want to decrease NetBoot times.

Once you’ve thrown away the obvious culprits – thanks to something like GrandPerspective – you might decide to trash the contents of /System/Library/Compositions/. I did. Unfortunately, this will break Photo Booth.

We relied on Photo Booth to test the iSight camera, so I came up with an alternative. Save this script as an application and put it in the Dock. Heck, I gave it the Photo Booth icon. It opens a new “movie recording” window in QuickTime Player, but it’s not actually recording. Good for a quick test, and faster than Photo Booth.

Tested with: 10.7, 10.8, 10.9, 10.10

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