Hackintosh: Hide and Rename Partitions on the bootloader screen

LogintoLion Theme

If you have a hackintosh and dual boot you might notice that all of your Windows partitions will be displayed on your bootloader option screen.  Well there is an easy way to clean up the bootloader by hiding and renaming partitions.  It's quite easy to do:

1. Open Terminal on OS X
2. Type diskutil list

You should notice that all of the hard drives connected to your machine will now be displayed similar to the screenshot below.

Now open your org.chameleon.Boot.plist file located on your hard drive in the Extra folder and add a few more keys and strings.  An example of my parameters are below:

Rename:
<key>Rename Partition</key>
<string>hd(1,1) Win7</string>

Above I am renaming disk1s1 which is System Reserved to Win7.  If you wanted to rename multiple partitions you would separate them with a semi-colon.  For example:

<key>Rename Partition</key>
<string>hd(1,1) Win7; hd(2,1) Win8</string>

Hide:
<key>Hide Partition</key>
<string>hd(1,2) hd(2,1)</string>

I am also hiding 2 partitions, disk1s2 and disk2s1 which will no longer display on my bootloader screen.  So now when I boot my computer I'll only see the OS X option and Win7.

If you encounter issues hiding and renaming partitions:
If the above method isn't working for you or if you notice that the disks keep changing order  when you run diskutil list in Terminal what you can do is this:

Open your org.chameleon.Boot.plist file in TextEdit.

Remove any string parameters for the Hide Partition and Rename Partition keys.

Add the following at the end:

<key>GUI</key>
<string>No</string>

You should have something similar to this:

Save it.  Now the next time you boot you should see something like the photo below:

You can take a picture of the hdd list or write it down, whatever you prefer, and the next time you boot in to OS X you'll now be able to correctly hide and rename the partitions using the prefixes listed in the boot menu.

Remember to remove the added GUI key and string to display the graphical boot menu.

Hope this guide helped.

*The theme used in the first screenshot is LogintoLion.

**I know previously I was able to rename and hide partitions based on their bootloader display name but it doesn't seem to work, for me at least.  I remember I was able to hide partitions simply by typing in the disk name (ie. "Windows C"), but that doesn't seem to work anymore.  Similarly I used to be able to rename partitions to include spaces (ie. "System Reserved" "Windows 7") but that too also doesn't seem to work.