More External Disk and Partitioning Question

[Mac Lad]

Hello all,

I have an Al Powerbook G4 1GHz. I have a dual boot setup (Mac OS X and Ubuntu 6.10). Well... I don't really like Ubuntu... and besides, they're dropping official support for powerpc. Anyway, I want to wipe out the Ubuntu installation and install Debian instead. Currently, my disk is partitioned into 3:

1. ~30GB for Mac OS X
2. ~6GB for Ubuntu
3. ~300MB swapfile (created by Ubuntu, I guess)

Now, I want to combine items 2 & 3 and give that for Debian. What's the best way to do accomplish this without destroying the existing Mac OS installation? (BTW, I don't have the Mac OS X nor System Restore CD/DVD, thanks to Hurricane Katrina)

I was thinking of doing the following:

1. Clone the Mac OS X installation to an external hard drive (bootable).
2. Boot Powerbook using the external drive.
3. Use Disk Utility to format and partition the disk in the Powerbook. Two partitions will be created, one for Mac and one for Debian.
4. Clone back the disk in external drive to the Powerbook.
5. Install Debian in the other partition in Powerbook.

Are the procedures above safe? I mean, I never clone an external drive to the laptop's internal hard drive. It's kind of twisted when I think about it.

Please lemme know what you all think... Thank you very much!!!

 

[Fearless Leader]

So if you're installing Debian it still needs a swapfile partition and if you combine 2 and 3 it'll just make a new one.

Or were you thinking of say a 15gig osx partition and a 15gig Debian partition?

Carbon Copy Cloner is your friend.

This should work as long as you make sure everything is copied as bootable.

 

[Mac Lad]

Thanks for the reply, Rokem. Now that you mentioned it, I think I'm gonna keep the 6GB for Debian and the 300MB for swap. How do I format these partitions on OS X (Panther)? What format (HFS, HFS+, ...) should I use?