how to and advantages of partiti8oning main drive

[biohazard6969]

ok, what are the advantages of partitioning the main drive of your computer, i know you can run 2 different OS's (or at least i think you can....) how would i do this? in disk utility anything under the partitioning tab is greyed out

[yellow]

Because Disk Utility requires you to erase the drive when you partition it. So if you're booted from it and using Disk Utility, it'll be grayed out. You'd have to boot from another volume (like the installer DVD) and use Disk Utility on that to partition your boot drive.. again.. it WILL ERASE EVERYTHING ON THE DRIVE YOU PARTITION.

IMO, there's almost no advantages to it. Because later on when you need to resize your partitions because it's not large enough.. you can't do it very easily. And I don't trust apps that change partition maps on the fly. So I'd be backing up my **** anyway and might as well use Disk Utility to do it right.

There's plenty of threads already in existence discussing the pros and cons of partitioning, hit the search feature and you should be able to find them with a little wading.

[Sun Baked]

Great when you first get the machine or are formatting a drive.

Splitting the drive in two will allows you to keep either two different OSs, or a backup on the smaller partition.

Some of the updates cause problems, so having a backup handy is sometimes great. And also handy for repairing your main boot volume.

Especially if you are apt to throw away some important OS files... ;)

Basically it just splits the drive in however many parts, each with its own file system.

In the old days it was easy to frag the file system and while the SCSI drives tended to last a long time, these days the drive is likely to die quicker.

So backups are still essential.

[yellow]

So backups are still essential.

And please don't misinterpret what SB is saying.. your back up should NOT be to another partition. If the hard drive fails, having your back up on another partition on the failed drive gains you not a damn thing. I'm fairly certain SB is referring to backing up on some outer source.