SuperDuper firewire partitions booting

[bogart]

My MBP hard disk is 250G.

I currently backup to a 250G LaCie firewire 800 (it also has FW 400 and USB) and it works great. Its bootable which is perfect.

I'm planning to get another LaCie and alternate them for backup. But there are some 500G LaCie disks on the shelves and it would make more sense to get a 500 and split into two partitions - one for backup and one to use as a scratch disk for other things, maybe the non-backup partition formatted in a way that I can use it on windows or mac.

Questions:

1. Is it possible to have one bootable partition for backup and another that one uses just for data, moving virtual machines around, iso images, stuff like that ?

2. Could the partitions be formatted quite differently, maybe one as a mac and one for windows (say FAT32, not NTFS) ?

3. How would I set this up - What kind of paritition table would be needed etc. ?

andy

 

[sickmacdoc]

My MBP hard disk is 250G.

I currently backup to a 250G LaCie firewire 800 (it also has FW 400 and USB) and it works great. Its bootable which is perfect.

I'm planning to get another LaCie and alternate them for backup. But there are some 500G LaCie disks on the shelves and it would make more sense to get a 500 and split into two partitions - one for backup and one to use as a scratch disk for other things, maybe the non-backup partition formatted in a way that I can use it on windows or mac.

Questions:

1. Is it possible to have one bootable partition for backup and another that one uses just for data, moving virtual machines around, iso images, stuff like that ?

2. Could the partitions be formatted quite differently, maybe one as a mac and one for windows (say FAT32, not NTFS) ?

3. How would I set this up - What kind of paritition table would be needed etc. ?

andy

1. Yes, having two partitions as you have described is certainly possible and works fine.

2. As far as formatting, again not a problem. When you establish the partitions in Disk Utility, you can specify a different format for each partition individually. In your case a "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" for the first partition in order to be bootable and "MS-DOS (FAT)" for the second since that is the Apple name for FAT32.

3. The partition table is only applied on a drive-wide basis, not to each partition, so in order for your first partition to be bootable the partition map scheme for the disk would need to be either GUID (for an Intel based Mac or APM for a PowerPC Mac (since I don't know what Mac you have). That may affect the ability to directly connect this to a PC as there has been a lot of confusion over that- so I am just going to try it this weekend on an old drive to find out. You might want to do the same if you are going to be hooking it up directly to a PC or perhaps someone else can answer that definitively.

Good luck!

 

[bogart]

SuperDuper firewire partitions booting

Great, thanks SMD.

Its an Intel Mac. So I think what you are saying is that if the drive-level partition table is of type GUID, that will let me have both Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and DOS partitions AND still boot the OS on the Mac OS Extended (Journaled) partition.

Is that right ?

When you have tried it can you report back ?

andy