Disable "The disk you inserted was not readable..." message for internal SATA drives #

As Apple continues to make its products harder and harder to repair, internal drive replacement is becoming a major hassle. You might find yourself with a bad SATA cable (e.g., "Unable to write to the last block of the device.") or dead hard drive, but not the will to spend hours dismantling and reassembling your Mac. You might decide to boot from a Thunderbolt, USB, or FireWire drive instead. However, you will be greeted by this cheery message on every boot:

The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer.
The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer. Initialize... | Ignore | Eject

Happily, James Newell has crafted and shared a modified DiskArbitrationAgent to ignore unreadable SATA drives. It also works great for ignoring volumes or file systems that OS X doesn't understand (TrueCrypt, ext4, ZFS, etc). Despite originally being Yosemite-only, he has kindly added builds for Mavericks and El Capitan today.

/mac | Oct 12, 2015


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