Safer to Reformat Drive Then Partition?

[jimmyabcz]

Hi all,

I'm looking to Dual Boot the system drive on my early 2011 MBP. The idea is to have a Snow Leopard boot for all my audio productions (Pro Tools, Logic etc. currently running more stable in SL than Lion) and a Lion boot for all my 'Home' activities (web, emails calendar etc.).

I know Snow Leopard allows you to partition a drive that is already in use. Of course, I have a backup of my system drive but is this wise? I've seen a few posters on here run into problems with the Lion/SL dual boot so I'm thinking it's safer to reformat, partition the drive in two then install 2xSL then upgrade one of them to Lion?

Thanks all,
J

 

[r0k]

Hi all,

I'm looking to Dual Boot the system drive on my early 2011 MBP. The idea is to have a Snow Leopard boot for all my audio productions (Pro Tools, Logic etc. currently running more stable in SL than Lion) and a Lion boot for all my 'Home' activities (web, emails calendar etc.).

I know Snow Leopard allows you to partition a drive that is already in use. Of course, I have a backup of my system drive but is this wise? I've seen a few posters on here run into problems with the Lion/SL dual boot so I'm thinking it's safer to reformat, partition the drive in two then install 2xSL then upgrade one of them to Lion?

Thanks all,
J

The 2x SL path seems safer based on what I've been reading as well. Everything I have now runs Lion except an old G4 mini. So rather than bother with any dual boot configs, I simply run my "old PPC stuff" on the G4 mini. If I were to try this on one of my newer machines, I would think the first step would be to resize Macintosh HD. If it resized successfully and was still bootable, I'd then create a new partition called Snow Leopard HD and make sure it was HFS+ (Journaled). Lastly, and this is the iffy part, I'd boot a SL DVD and see if it could find SL HD to install to. If not, I'd plug in an old HDD using an SATA to USB cable, format it GUID Partition table/HFS+ (Journaled) and let the DVD install to that. Then I'd use CCC to copy SL from the external USB disk to the SL HD partition I created in the extra space I freed up when I resized Macintosh HD.

hope this helps...