HD Partitioning

digitalandres

I know almost nothing about partitioning, but I think I have the right idea here, so bear with me;



But is there a way to sortof make my HD into, well, two? I'd like to sortof "create" a new Hard Drive where I can just keep my apps, music, movies and docs and prefrences and things like that, and then have another system HD that I could reformat every month or so to keep the poor computer from eating itself.



So... can that happen?

ghost_user_name

Yup.



Boot off of your Mac OS X Install CD and choose Disk Utility from the Installer menu. Select your hard drive, click the partition tab, and split to your heart's content.



Important note: partitioning your drive will erase ALL contents from it. You also cannot recombine partitions without erasing ALL contents again.



So, choose very carefully when you partition if you partition.



As for "keeping the computer from eating itself", I think that resoning is unnecessary unless you're going to be doing some weird hacking or unsupported *nix tweaks to the system. My Mac has been running flawlessly with next to zero maintenance on my part for many months.

ibrowse

What about creating a new partition from free space (an old linux partition, already deleted with Linux boot CD) will that affect the current partition? I got the old extra one back from Linux with the install CD for Linux, but it wouldn't make a new one using hfs+. I figure that if I can delete one partition without it touching my OS X partition. If I boot off the install CD and go to Disk Utility it could, but it tells me it will erase the current partitions too.

digitalandres

Brad, so to do it I need to to totally lose everything? Hmmm.



About the computer eating itself: it does. I dunno, in my experiance computers always do this. I've had my iMac for about 7 months now. I don't really know HOW to do maintenence on it, so I guess I havent done any. But anyway, yeah, loading up programs seems to take longer these days, sometimes it stakes several minutes to boot up... the OS crashed for the first time last week... iut would just be nice to be able to have like a 10G HD dedicated to the system files and stuff that I could just dump every few months, and have anotherone for all my actual data.



Do you think that's a bad idea?

dobby

Quote:

Originally posted by digitalandres

iut would just be nice to be able to have like a 10G HD dedicated to the system files and stuff that I could just dump every few months, and have anotherone for all my actual data.



Do you think that's a bad idea?

That is a very good idea.



I do this on my macs where I have 2 physical disk each can boot but 1 is the primary boot disk and the other is for data.

I can then reformat the data disk when needed and vice versa I can boot of my data disk if my boot disk has a problem.



I also do this for my PC's as well.



Dobby.

digitalandres

Exactly, that's what I want, I just don't know exzactly how to do it.



I'll look at thee utility thing Brad mntioned, but I'd rather not go muck everything up by not knowing what im doing...

ghost_user_name

If you want to split your drive into multiple logical partitions, that's your own choice. It's all subjective as to just how you like to organize your files. If you want multiple possible boot partitions in case of an emergency, you have every right to it and it's fairly simple to do.



Unfortunately, there are currently no utilities for Mac OS X that I know which can repartition an existing drive without reformatting it. So, you will have to back up *all* of your essential data *before* partitioning your drive if you choose to go that route.



If you're having weird issues with OS X itself (eating itself, as you say), then I doubt that this alone would be the best solution. There are a few very simple things you can do to Mac OS X to make it run much smoother and more stable. Here are a few of them.



If I was to ever write a Mac OS X how-to guide or book for novices, these three would be the FIRST to go in the "regular maintenance" section.



1. Enable "journaling". Journaling is a feature that was added in 10.2.2 that can drastically help some systems. In short, it safeguards the filesystem so that it can practically *never* become corrupted. Whenever apps bug out or crash or the machine freezes, it usually has files open or is in the middle of writing to the disk. During those events, the fiesystem can get corrupted as the system writes bad data or forgets to close off files. Journaling keeps a record of all filesystem changes so it can instantly repair the disk without needing to scan through a lengthy disk integrity checker. Unfortunately, Apple only has a GUI toggle for this in the Server version of Mac OS X. Fortunately, it's easy to enable through the Terminal on any other regular Mac OS X installation or through the free utility Cocktail.



Before enabling journaling, though, it is imperative that you boot from the Mac OS X Install CD and run Disk Utility to repair any possible existing damage first because once you enable the journaling, it will preserve the damage that is already there. I can provide any additional details on the process if you like.



2. Repair permissions whenever you install a system update or anything that uses Apple's standard Installer application. You don't even need to reboot off of a CD to do this one. Just open Disk Utility from the Utilities folder, select your drive or partition, click the First Aid tab, and click Repair Disk Permissions. What this does is verify the Unix-style permission settings on all the essential system files. This occasionally needs to be done because some poorly-written installer scripts can overwrite the correct permissions with bad permission settings.



3. Don't use "themes" or "haxies" or other system-wide hacks. Simple as that. The reasons should be obvious.



Hope this helps.