Dr. Mac's OS X Tip-of-the-Day  

Yesterday's tip reminded me of something I've been meaning to cover here--disk partitioning. I've received several emails from....

Hey... Hang on a sec. What are you people out there in Internet-land called, anyway? Are you my readers? Subscribers? Viewers? Listers? Tipsters? Or what?

I'll tell you what. Let's make a contest out of this. The reader/subscriber/viewer/lister/tipster/whatever who comes up with the most creative, most descriptive name for y'all collectively (e.g. the subscribers to this tip-mail) will receive an autographed copy of The Little iTunes Book courtesy of moi.

OK. Now back to our regularly scheduled tip. As I was saying before I so rudely interrupted myself, I've received several requests for some tips about partitioning your hard disk, and what should go where?

Let me start by saying that not partitioning is certainly fine for many people. In fact, Apple doesn't make it easy to partition a new Mac--they arrive with a single hard disk with a single partition containing everything. And if it's good enough to be the default for Apple it's good enough for most people.

But not me. I always have at least two volumes mounted, and usually more than that. Right this second there are five hard disks (six if you count the iPod). All but two are partitioned so they have more than one volume (usually two).

Why partition? As I said, you don't have to. But if it's not too much hassle, I like at least two volumes on my desktop at all times. The first one is my boot disk. It contains a complete OS X and 9.2.2 installation, plus all the stuff that has to live on that volume (see yesterday's tip). On the second disk I have a 9.2.2 System Folder and all my other stuff--documents, applications, mp3s, utilities, fonts, and such.

So the first benefit is that I can erase (reformat) the boot drive and reinstall Mac OS X if it ever comes to that. I would suffer minimal inconvenience because the only folder on the disk that matters to me is my Library, which I back up nightly. I'd be back up and running inside of an hour. (I hope.)

The second benefit is that you'll have a second boot disk if OS X gets hosed. You can boot from the OS 9 volume and poke around. You can run Disk First Aid, DiskWarrior, or Norton from this volume. Maybe you can fix things, or at the very least copy all the files you need from the boot volume to another disk before you erase it and reinstall OS X. Point being: If you have one volume and you hose the OS, you're limited to bootable CD-ROMs. If you have two volumes with operating systems you have a better chance of recovering quickly.

Finally, and this is most useful to people who need to use OS 9 (not Classic) frequently. That is, if you have two volumes, you can hold down the Option key immediately after restarting or powering up to invoke the "Startup Manager," a piece of Open Firmware that lets you choose which volume to boot from before the startup process begins. So rather than having to boot into one OS, change the Startup Disk setting, restart, and so on, you can choose 9 or X right at startup. It's neat. And, it can also come in handy for troubleshooting (see the second benefit above...).

As I said I have 7 or 8 volumes on my desktop most of the time, and I install OS 9, OS X, or both on most of them. The way I figure it, you can never have too many startup disks, just in case.

But you'll have to wait until Freeware Friday when I tell you all about the fabulous Carbon Copy Cloner, and how I use it on these 7 or 8 volumes...

To discuss this tip (or anything you like) in Dr. Mac's OSXFAQ Forum, click here:

http://forums.osxfaq.com/viewtopic.php?topic=504&forum=100

Bob LeVitus is a leading authority on Mac OS and the author of 37 books, including Mac OS X For Dummies and The Little iTunes Book.