Moving User and other folders to other partition

[hiroo]

I'm about to try my first hack install and since it seems (from reading these forums) that it might involve quite a bit of reinstalling and other messing around with the OS, I was thinking of moving the user folder and some of the other custom folders to a separate partition and then linking them back using filesystem level links ("ln -s" in terminal). However, I'm not sure if OS X will barf when I do this, so does anybody know it will work?

 

The folders I'd want to move (in order of priority) are:

- /Users/*

- /Applications

- /Library

 

As far as I know, these are the folders that contain any customized data and the rest is just OS install stuff. I'm pretty confident that the user folder one will work, but less sure about the Applications and even less sure about the main Library.

 

Any experiences or advice?

 

Also, about how large should the OS partition be if it is to be OS only?

 

Thanks.

[Guest bikedude880]

I actually did this not too long ago, let me dig up the article I used.

 

http://www.bombich.com/mactips/homedir.html

 

This will guide you through a non-destructive process of moving all the files. I did it on my comp and everything still works just fine, didn't break any apps. I would leave the Applications and Library folder where they are though, and just backup the files you need from them instead.

[hiroo]

any experiences with moving the apps and library folder?