How should I partition my hard drive?

[trirod]

I have just bought a "new to me" iMac on ebay - G3, 500MHz to replace my old faithful blueberry 350 MHz (mainly to get firewire, a CD burner that is actually recognized by iTunes and more memory and hard disk space).

My old iMac has a 6GB HDD in 2 partitions - one for OS 9.2 and one for OS10.2.8. The new HDD will be 80GB. The simple questions are:

- should this also be partitioned?
- if so, how big should each partition be?

I won't be using OS9 for much, so I would assume that I would put aside 3 or 4 GB for that and the rest would go to OSX. Does that make sense or am I somehow missing the point?

Thanks

Rod

 

[wrldwzrd89]

I have just bought a "new to me" iMac on ebay - G3, 500MHz to replace my old faithful blueberry 350 MHz (mainly to get firewire, a CD burner that is actually recognized by iTunes and more memory and hard disk space).

My old iMac has a 6GB HDD in 2 partitions - one for OS 9.2 and one for OS10.2.8. The new HDD will be 80GB. The simple questions are:

- should this also be partitioned?
- if so, how big should each partition be?

I won't be using OS9 for much, so I would assume that I would put aside 3 or 4 GB for that and the rest would go to OSX. Does that make sense or am I somehow missing the point?

Thanks

Rod

Why even bother? Mac OS X and Mac OS 9 are designed to coexist on the same partition as long as that partition is HFS Plus-formatted. If you don't know what HFS Plus is, then don't partition the hard drive - you can safely assume that the disk is HFS Plus-formatted. If you want to check the format, just Get Info for the disk in question; if it says "Mac OS Extended" or "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)", then you're good to go. If it says anything else, reformat the disk first (you'll need to boot the Mac from the install CD, choose Open Disk Utility from the menubar, select the disk in question, select "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" (if it's not available use "Mac OS Extended") as the format, click Erase, and confirm that you really want to do this. Once this is done, Mac OS X, as well as everything else, will need to be re-installed.)

 

[jackieonasses]

I have always heard that a partition will slow the speed down marginally. I would suggest against it.

 

[pncc]

I have always heard that a partition will slow the speed down marginally. I would suggest against it.

I haven't heard that. One distinct advantage to partitioning (especially for dual boot systems) is that if you have a problem with OS X, you can boot into the OS 9 partition and work on it. You can't do that with a single partition drive. You can't boot into OS 9 on single partition at startup (hold down Option key) either.

 

[Nermal]

You can't boot into OS 9 on single partition at startup (hold down Option key) either.

But you can boot from the OS X CD, then use the Startup Disk utility to boot from the copy of OS 9 on your hard drive. Sure, it takes a bit longer, but I'm just letting you know that it's possible