Disk Arbitration

We have Disk Arbitration ON/OFF tools available for your convenience in our Files section. They run on Snow Leopard and Leopard and make turning Disk Arbitration On and Off as easy as a double-click.


Leopard
Disk Arbitration has changed in Leopard. It is now controlled thru launchd. launchctl is the control that sends the commands to launchd. The following will shut off Disk Arbitration on a Macintosh running Leopard.

sudo launchctl unload
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.diskarbitrationd.plist

Change "unload" the "load" to turn Disk Arbitration back on.

ActivityMonitor_DiskArbitrationd

Above, Activity Monitor shows us that diskarbitrationd now runs under the parent process of launchd.

Tiger
Disk Arbitration is Tiger is controlled through the removal or addition of a PList file in the appropriate directory.
  • sudo cp /etc/mach_init.d/diskarbitrationd.plist /Backup/
  • sudo rm /etc/mach_init.d/diskarbitrationd.plist

I HOPE YOU MADE THE BACKUP in the first command!

  • Reboot your system and Disk Arbitration is now off.

To turn Disk Arbitration back on, copy the original file back to its original location

  • sudo cp /Backup/diskarbitrationd.plist /etc/mach_init.d/

Reboot your system and Disk Arbitration is now on.