Tools of the trade for a partition fiddler

[ltpitt]

I would like to have fun with dual / triple OS on my emac G4 and I think that I will have to fight a lot with partitions soon, what are the tools I should get?
I real about Volumeworks, ipartition, drive genius...
Which is the best ones to backup / restore / delete and resize apple and Linux partitions?
Thanks!

 

[XaPHER]

I'm not wild about partition resizing, but if you want to touch non-HFS volumes, Disk Utility is not a big help here. I would personnally recommend iPartition. I do not find the interface very intuitive, and you still can't modify the partition table of your boot drive, but it sees all partitions and does get the job done.

When multi-booting the ideal solution is to partition your drive ahead of time (preferably with drive setup in Mac OS 9, or Disk Utility in Mac OS X) and avoid editing the partitions as much as possible afterwards. Of course if you're experimenting a lot this isn't always possible. A firewire hard drive enclosure can be very handy for this kind of thing when your machine can't take more than one internal drive.

My MDD and my G4 Digital Audio tri-boot (Leopard, OS 9, Linux) and (Leopard, OS 9, NetBSD) respectively. I Like to take Linux and/or *BSD on a separate drive.

 

[ltpitt]

I'm not wild about partition resizing, but if you want to touch non-HFS volumes, Disk Utility is not a big help here. I would personnally recommend iPartition. I do not find the interface very intuitive, and you still can't modify the partition table of your boot drive, but it sees all partitions and does get the job done.

When multi-booting the ideal solution is to partition your drive ahead of time (preferably with drive setup in Mac OS 9, or Disk Utility in Mac OS X) and avoid editing the partitions as much as possible afterwards. Of course if you're experimenting a lot this isn't always possible. A firewire hard drive enclosure can be very handy for this kind of thing when your machine can't take more than one internal drive.

My MDD and my G4 Digital Audio tri-boot (Leopard, OS 9, Linux) and (Leopard, OS 9, NetBSD) respectively. I Like to take Linux and/or *BSD on a separate drive.

Is it possible / easy to start from a cd containing iPartition? (i have an eMac so only 1 hdd).

 

[repairedCheese]

No, I've never gotten something like iPartition working. I've personally had better luck doing my partitioning with a Lubuntu live disk using the partitioning program parted. It's funny, linux doesn't like writing to HFS+ but parted generally has no trouble resizing partitions formatted like that. Though, there's a reason linux doesn't write to journaled HFS+, it doesn't have tools to repair things if they go wrong.

But I have resized quite a few partitions with parted. You can use the Leopard Disk Utility to do the same, but it gets weird about it, especially if you have a non-Mac partition on the drive at all.

What's more, I recently had a need to do some partition resizing. But for some reason, nothing worked. I still don't know why. The solution I was able to use was to use Disk Utility to make backups of the partitions, redid the partitions, and then restored everything to the larger space I'd made for it all.

 

[ltpitt]

Leopard is also a nice idea but...
Will it delete Linux partitions?

 

[repairedCheese]

Leopard is also a nice idea but...
Will it delete Linux partitions?

Even OS 9 can delete linux partitions. The problem is that none of them can do more than that with anything newer than ext2, and most linux distros default with ext4, so you arenb't going toi be doing anything other than deleting the partition.

Where as, at least with linux, you can access hfs+, even if it is journaled. You just can't write to it if it is. But don't think you can live with it not being journaled, hfs+ is already a crotchety file system on a good day, and journaling is about the only thing keeping it from turning into a nightmare when you have a lockup.

Basically, you should learn some linux, because you're sort of going to need to use it with the Mac OS if you want to get the most out of all of this. Otherwise you really need to know what you want ahead of time.

 

[ltpitt]

Even OS 9 can delete linux partitions. The problem is that none of them can do more than that with anything newer than ext2, and most linux distros default with ext4, so you arenb't going toi be doing anything other than deleting the partition.

Where as, at least with linux, you can access hfs+, even if it is journaled. You just can't write to it if it is. But don't think you can live with it not being journaled, hfs+ is already a crotchety file system on a good day, and journaling is about the only thing keeping it from turning into a nightmare when you have a lockup.

Basically, you should learn some linux, because you're sort of going to need to use it with the Mac OS if you want to get the most out of all of this. Otherwise you really need to know what you want ahead of time.

OK, thanks!
But it seems like Tiger, 10.4 cannot delete Linux partitions...
It says that they have to be minted :S

 

[weckart]

Is it possible / easy to start from a cd containing iPartition? (i have an eMac so only 1 hdd).

This is how I do it. iPartition came with a bundled utility called Coirolis utilities, which took files from your existing Tiger installation and created a minimal Tiger boot volume from which iPartition (and iDefrag) could be selected from a menu. You then restored the resulting .dmg file to a DVD blank. Potentially, you could restore to a USB pen or external FW drive.

Someone has already created the Tiger boot DVD for you on Macintoshgarden, so that should save you some time.

https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/ipartition

 

[ltpitt]

I've burned it and, classic, it doesn't boot.
The frustration of making a bootable CD for old macs is unforgettable.
I am building a small library of working bootable cds / dvds that I will bring into my grave.

 

[Amethyst1]

Did you burn it to a DVD?

 

[ltpitt]

Yes, it was on the instructions.

And obviously, the content is perfectly readable but CD is not bootable (tried also OF).

Aaaaah, sweet frustration