Installing software is often a simple drag-and-drop process. But you'll occasionally run across an application that uses a dedicated installer to step you through the installation and setup process. These installer apps are helpful little buggers, except for one notable flaw. They tend to want to search every last bit of space on every mounted hard drive, to see if any files from previous versions of their parent application need to be updated.
Even if you have multiple hard drives, if you're like most of us, you store all of your applications on one drive or drive partition, usually the same one that holds your operating system. If that's the case, then why hang around waiting while the installer searches other mounted hard drives for something it's never going to find? The search can take a long time if you have lots of storage space, such as one or more of the newer 1 TB drives.
To save yourself unnecessary time and aggravation, unmount any drives that won't be needed before you run the installer.
Unmount Hard Drives
Mounted hard drives will appear on your desktop, as well as in a Finder window's sidebar. You can unmount a hard drive from either location by right-clicking the hard drive's icon, either on the desktop or in a sidebar, and selecting 'Eject [drive name]’ from the pop-up window.
Use the above method to unmount all hard drives (except your startup volume), and then proceed with the software installation.
By the way, this tip also works with Apple software updates.
When the software installation is complete, you can remount the hard drives.
Mount Hard Drives
There are two ways to remount a hard drive so you can access it again. One is to restart your computer; the other is to use Disk Utility.
- Launch Disk Utility, located at /Applications/Utilities/.
- In the Disk Utility window your unmounted hard drives will appear as grayed-out names.
- Select one of the ghost hard drive names.
- Click the ‘Mount’ button.
- Repeat the above steps for any additional drives you want to remount.
I highly recommend keeping Disk Utility available in the Dock, for easy access. While Disk Utility is running, right-click its icon in the Dock and select ‘Keep in Dock’ from the pop-up menu.
