I want to not auto-mount a partition, but I messed up: /etc/fstab asking for encryption password and does nothing (macOS Ventura)

Question

I want to have two partitions, one for home and one for work, but do not want the partitions to “see” each other, hence not-automounting the partition came in mind.

So I made two partitions, and then I went into Terminal, looked up the UUID for "work", opened up sudo vifs and entered the following:

UUID=<..> none APFS rw, noauto. 

I pressed escape and then entered :X to close the file. It did not do anything, then I thought it must be because it is encrypted. So I entered:

UUID=<..> none APFS encrypted rw, noauto 

Then I pressed escape followed by :X, but here sudo vifs asks me the encryption password. Here I messed up, I know. I do not know what to do, so I entered the normal admin password but it will not save and exit. So I stopped the file and know I get a notice that I need to choose between quit, delete etc. I did a bunch of options and I am stuck. It now says swap files found.

At this moment I repeated steps and nothing helped. I got it to go back to a file that says the first line :UUID=<..> none APFS rw, noauto. But when I try to alter it and press escape followed by :X, it will still ask for the encryption password. I tried using the admin password of that partition, but I need to enter it again and then nothing. When I try to close /etc/fstab, it will ask if I want to terminate the process.

The thing that I want is that sudo vifs is normal again. Can you help get the sudo vifs file normal again?

Then I want to add the line like Alexander Presber said (Prevent encrypted APFS volume on partition to automount / ask for password on login - Catalina):

UUID=C58A1BDC-593C-4854-B954-702A73ABD67C none auto noauto

Hopefully this line with "auto" knows what format it is and hopefully it will not ask for the encryption key.

Answer 1

Your problem is coming from using the wrong keyboard commands to exit vi. Applied correctly, the answer to Prevent encrypted APFS volume on partition to automount / ask for password on login - Catalina should work in your case as well.

• Get the UUIDs for the drives/partitions you want to NOT automount on start
• Run sudo vifs
• Add the lines

UUID=<UID of work partition> none auto noauto
UUID=<UID of home partition> none auto noauto

• Press ESC
• Type :wq to write the file to disk and quit vi.

You can check whether your update was successful by running cat /etc/fstab and looking for the lines you've inserted.