Advice on utilising new ext HD please

Does your PB support booting from OS9? if so, can you reboot your the PB into either OS9 or OSX?

You can partition it easily using Apple's disk utility (in Applications/Utilities) and, if you make a partition about the size of your main drive, you can use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone your drive. This is an effective copy of OS X and can also be made bootable. Don't know about OS 9 though.

Partitions and OS 9 at startup

Hello - looking for a little more detail on this subject. I have never used partitions either.

My new PB is on the way, and I'm looking for advice about partitioning the drive. I'll need to have access to OS 9 (preferably a boot version rather than Classic - will the new PB's boot OS 9?), so I like the idea of a separate partition... but how big should the partition be? And does this partition need to be HFS+ or UFS or does it matter?

Also, about partitioning a new disk in general... is it entirely a matter of convenience / organization, or are there technical benefits?

Thanks in advance for any help...

I.

Originally posted by sparky76
You can partition it easily using Apple's disk utility (in Applications/Utilities) and, if you make a partition about the size of your main drive, you can use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone your drive. This is an effective copy of OS X and can also be made bootable. Don't know about OS 9 though.

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Do you have any more information on this. I have an 80 GB external Firewire drive and I'd like to do 2 partitions and clone my iMac and iBook and make both bootable. I'm assuming this is a great way to back up and restore should anything happen.

Well folks, my first suggestion would be to try different configurations on that external harddrive. Play around and see what you want to do with it, make it bootable, for games, have a single partition, etc.

Just keep in mind that everytime you repartition it, you will wipe out any data on it!!

In your Application/Utilities launch Disk Utility. It will show all your drives on the left pane, and on the right you will see the tabs for partitioning and erasing drives.

Pick the size of the partitions you want to do from the Volume Schemes, and partition the drives. Once Disk Utility is done, you now have a newly partition drive.

Make sure you are paritioning your external drive, I don't think the utility will allow you to partition your startup disk, but don't mess with that one until you know what you are doing.

scarer Even if you make an OS9 boot drive, your PB won't be able to boot in it. I you really want to partition, I recommend choosing a partition the size of your internal HD for cloning a backup startup disk, you can save the later for storing other stuff if you want.


professorp I don't believe you can boot your new PB into OS9, you will have to use classic. Check the specs to make sure. There is really no technical benefit any more to paritioning, just a logical organization, since each partition shows up on your desktop as a separate disk. You should probably parition as MacOS Extended partition (i think that is HFS+).


rdowns Follow my instructions above to create the partitions. Make sure the size of each is big enough to hold the local hard drive of the machine you want to clone to that partition. Use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the local drives to the external HD and make sure to tell it to make the parition bootable. Restart from the paritions, and enjoy.

Hope this helps you out folks!

Thanks very much iShater...

Another question: At the other extreme from having no partitions at all, does anyone out there have one partition for the iTunes library, another for the iPhoto lilbrary, etc... and if so, does this work well for you?

I.

Originally posted by professorp
Thanks very much iShater...

Another question: At the other extreme from having no partitions at all, does anyone out there have one partition for the iTunes library, another for the iPhoto lilbrary, etc... and if so, does this work well for you?

I.

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Is there even a reason too? There is no obvious benefit other than a lot of desktop icons , IMO.

My personal preference is to have two partititions, one for OS(es) and Apps and the other for User Home Dirs. This way I can clean the slate and reinstall OS and preserve most of my user prefs, files, photos, music, etc...

I have read others that setup separate partitions for scratch disks and video editing, but I don't do that yet, so I am happy with two partitions.

FYI, if the drive fails it won't matter how many partitions you have, so make sure to backup often to permanent storage such as CD or DVD... or even tape for that matter.

Originally posted by professorp
Thanks very much iShater...

Another question: At the other extreme from having no partitions at all, does anyone out there have one partition for the iTunes library, another for the iPhoto lilbrary, etc... and if so, does this work well for you?

I.

Click to expand...

I think it becomes a headache when you have too many paritions. I would stick to 2 tops, and that was in my case a cloning parition and a scratch disk/backup parition.