What is the main idea?

[sup3r1or]

Okay guys,

I have finally got my Leopard running 100% on my PC. Iam planing a full switch to OSX from Windows, but after using Windows for more than 10 years, I have a few questions poping out:

 

1. MY HDD is 500GB, (iam planing to buy one more soon). Then most of the guides here suggest to have only 1 partition. So what does that emply? That I have to have only one paritition? what is the benefit of that? Does the system really needs so much space? Does that mean I have to keep my music and movies on the same drive as system, organized in thouse movies, music, photos folders?

What if something goes wrong and I loose all that (cuz I think time machine need external HDD, which I currently dont have).

 

2. I still leave WinXP on a lonely small partition cuz I like to play some games once in a while. MY movies and media are all stored on NTFS partitions which Leo can see (copy/run) BUT CANNOT MODIFY OR DELETE. But windows on the other hand cannot see the mac partition at all, so If I keep all the files on Mac partition I wont be able to see or run any of them.

 

Is there any way out of this?

 

3. The last but not least, Installing programs that usually comes as pkg files or dmg how to install it correctly? I mean u just copy the file (like skype or VLC) to your appz folder? can place a shortcut to the doc?

 

Thanks a million to all who will clear up some issues.

[mschilling]

Good question about the home folder. Maybe someone will explain how they use a home folder on a separate partition from the system, like linux users do. I haven't seen it done maybe because there isn't the need to change systems so often like linux.

You don't have to use the suggested folders, just like in windows, but some of the apps will use them, like iphoto uses the Pictures folder.

There is no real reason to access your music, or videos from windows, vs. mac. They will both work fine, so why not just keep everything on a mac partition, and use osx for playing movies, music, etc. If you want to transfer files, you can always use a FAT partition, as on a memory stick, as that will work on both.

No need to transfer a dmg file anywhere. It usually launches from the downloads folder, and it will create a disk image on your desktop. You just drag the app into the app folder from the disk image. When that's done copying, you can eject the disk image, and eventually trash the downloaded file from the download folder. If the dmg is on a memory stick, I've had better luck copying the dmg to the hdd before launching.

[sup3r1or]

The reason I keep windows is, Games man:) There are some titles coming that I want to play such as Red Alert 3 or Mirrors edge:) Otherwise I wont need the XP already

[Kasakka]

You can use Paragon NTFS (not free) or NTFS-3G (free) to get NTFS writing capabilities. In my experience Paragon works better. On the Windows side the best alternative is MacDrive, again unfortunately not free. The free alternative is HFS Explorer but it can only read the Mac partitions. HFS Explorer has been enough for me because I don't usually need to do anything more than move files downloaded using OSX from HFS+ partitions to Windows' NTFS partitions (when I forget to copy them from OSX).

 

I just reinstalled OSX because I was having some severe problems that I couldn't solve (certain programs causing launchd to crash, meaning that no other programs could be started and display corruption issues). I had to borrow an external hard drive to backup my stuff before destroying the whole OSX partition. Now I made two partitions to try to avoid that, I hope that I can set my Downloads, Documents etc folders to work on the 2nd partition and leave the Library, Applications etc on the first.