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lilcorey10

macrumors member
Original poster
Jan 5, 2012
39
0
I have a 128Gb SSD that i will put in the main HDD bay and put the current 500Gb drive in the opti-bay.

I want to leave the 128 Gb SSD for Mac OS X Lion only.

So, I need to install Windows 7 x64 through Boot Camp to my secondary SATA HDD. I also want to leave part of that HDD for files, music, docs.

My setup would be like:
128Gb SSD with Lion and apps
250Gb Hdd partition with docs for Lion
250Gb Hdd partition for bootcamp(Win7)

Can I do this?

My idea is to make the bootcamp partion while i still only have the 500Gb drive in my mac. Next, replace the Hdd with the SSd and install Lion on it. Then put the 500Gb Hdd in the opti-bay and reformat the lion installation so I can use it just for storage while still keeping the bootcamp partition.

Thanks a lot!
 
You don't need 128GB for Lion and Apps. I have a lot of apps installed and Snow Leopard and Apps need still only 41GB. If I cut down on some stuff it would be some 35GB that it needs.

I recommend 40-60GB NTFS Partition for bootcamp on the SSD.
The rest HFS+ for Lion/Apps and working data.
Format the whole HDD in exFAT and reference picture, movie, music folders in OSX and Windows the same.

Wasteing all your ssd space on OSX is only sensible if you hardly ever need Windows. In any other case faster reboots, extremely fast VM launch times say that Windows has to be on the SSD, otherwise the ssd is a waste of money.

Just install Lion and bootcamp on the SSD and do nothing with the HDD until that is done. Format all the HDD in exFAT or split it up into smaller parts if you like but use it entirely for data and backups.


In theory though you can do it your way too. There really is no limitation in partitions or on which physical hdd they lie. You can just by use of "carbon copy cloner" clone the Lion partition to the SSD. You don't need to install it twice. As long as the data of the source partition fits into the target partition that works just fine. For most uses it is a poor setup though. Only people that have huge working data set that can not be properly split and require windows only every few weeks it makes sense.
 
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