OSX Tiger Install Discs and Partitions

[atcskyfox]

Just picked up an Imac 20" G5 2.1ghz 512mb 250gb. Will be upgrading to 2.5gb Ram this week from OWC. The Imac came with 2 discs OSX Tiger for Imac. I also have a DVD Install disc for OSX Tiger. My question is are these two install discs the same? IE. I would like to do a reformat and clean install of OSX like I do on my WinXP box. Does the discs that come with the Imac have some uneeded applications like those OEM computers that come with AOL, etc.

Also, I would like to create two partitions on my hard disk 1-OSX/APPLICATIONS and 2-STORAGE how would I do that on an Mac?

Thanks!

 

[Mechcozmo]

You don't need to make two partitions. Very easy to reinstall OS X without loosing ANY data. (Archive and Install)

The two disks that came with your iMac are probably the Install DVD and the restore DVD. The Install DVD installs OS X. The Restore DVD gets you the iLife apps that came with your computer along with the other apps that came with it, (Quicken, etc. These are full versions, not 30-day trials, and I actually use a number of the ones that came free with my PowerBook daily)

It sounds like you are a recent switcher. You don't need to do a lot of the things you do on Windows, such as the two partition setup.

 

[ITASOR]

A big difference is that your restore disks probably have iLife '06 on them, where as your regular Tiger disk does not.

 

[atcskyfox]

acutally the Imac came with iLife 05 and a drop in dvd of iLife 06
is there a way to create seperate partitions upon OSX install like WinXP just curious

 

[grapes911]

is there a way to create seperate partitions upon OSX install like WinXP just curious

Yes. Just use Disk Utility. It's pretty straight forward, but it's pretty useless unless you need a FAT32 partition or something.

 

[SmurfBoxMasta]

Yes. Just use Disk Utility. It's pretty straight forward, but it's pretty useless unless you need a FAT32 partition or something.

ALthough not necessary, perhaps the OP just wants to have a partition for storing files/data ect seperate from his OS & Apps, or to install another OS onto or something. He does have 250GB of space to play with after all

 

[grapes911]

ALthough not necessary, perhaps the OP just wants to have a partition for storing files/data ect seperate from his OS & Apps, or to install another OS onto or something. He does have 250GB of space to play with after all

I figured that would fall under the "or something" category. I'll specify. A separate partition for Apps or you home folder is pretty useless. By moving you're apps they won't get updated properly. By moving your home folder, you get nothing in return. I do not know the OP's intent.

 

[jhu]

a separate partition for the swap file would also be a good idea to prevent fragmentation of the swap file

 

[JFreak]

a separate partition for the swap file would also be a good idea to prevent fragmentation of the swap file

That's too geeky even by my standards. It's quite enough to have "small enough" system partition (50GB is plenty), and leave the rest for /Users storage. The way to do it transparently is to create an /etc/fstab file which specifies mount points for the system. In plain english, with that file you can tell the OS to "place the Storage partition in place of /Users folder", which i believe is what the topic starter was looking for in the first place.

A separate partition for home folder is pretty useless. By moving your home folder, you get nothing in return.

Quite the opposite; by placing another partition in place of /Users there's no way system reinstall would wipe any user data or app settings. After successfull clean reinstall one just mounts that another partition back to /Users and all previous data and settings are there without any extra trouble.

One might say that this is why there is an archive&install option available; however, having all system files and data on one continuous partition is a performance problem after a while - files tend to fragment all over the partition, and the smaller the partition, the tighter the performance. Performance-wise, the size of a partition is measured in percentage, and because disk is a round surface, the first 10% (closer to the edge) will perform better than the last 10% (closer to the center).

So, in real-world terms, if one has 250GB drive, it would be optimal to allocate first 50GB to System partition and leave the rest for Storage space (assuming the user in question knows how to specify mount points with /etc/fstab file).

 

[grapes911]

Quite the opposite; by placing another partition in place of /Users there's no way system reinstall would wipe any user data or app settings. After successfull clean reinstall one just mounts that another partition back to /Users and all previous data and settings are there without any extra trouble.

One might say that this is why there is an archive&install option available;

I will say that. Archive and install takes care of this.

however, having all system files and data on one continuous partition is a performance problem after a while - files tend to fragment all over the partition, and the smaller the partition, the tighter the performance. Performance-wise, the size of a partition is measured in percentage, and because disk is a round surface, the first 10% (closer to the edge) will perform better than the last 10% (closer to the center).

What you say is true when talking about small files, but smaller files are automatically defragged in OS X. Larger files can be fragmented without any performance loss. By the time the first part of a file is executed/stored/whatever, the next part is generally already found. And yes, parts a disk will preform better, but not necessarily parts of a partition.

 

[JFreak]

What you say is true when talking about small files, but smaller files are automatically defragged in OS X. Larger files can be fragmented without any performance loss.

You make assumptions about how people use their computers; I'm talking about performance in theory and in general and thank God with Unix systems that also happens to be real-world reality.

When you partition your drive, you effectively cut your drive's SEEK times into very small amount compared to occasional full strokes that happen with unpartitioned drives. No I'm not saying that ALL users would benefit from this - most would likely not even notice - but for whoever who does multimedia work, it is the seek time that happens to be the most important spec. Current drives have enough throughput for demanding applications, but the seek time is still many times the bottleneck; and halving that is actually 100% equivalent to installing another drive.

So, it was my understanding that the person asking this question would be getting into this kind of work and needed real facts, which I provided. As i said, there is probably not much benefit for most people from doing this, but on the other hand there are only a handful of people who would find this partitioning making things worse. And they are the people who already know that they shouldn't do this, so it's generally a win-win to think about wisely partitioning the drives.