tasc Posted August 30, 2007 Share Posted August 30, 2007 I have my PC partitioning strategy down, and it seems to work great for me. However, as I move to OS X, I'm not sure of the best way to do things. On the PC side, I have a 320gig hard drive. I make a 30gig partition for Windows/Programs, and then use the remaining ~290gig data/user files. During the windows install process, I will ghost image the windows partition multiple times at various points of completeness so I can roll back and start at any specific point (before drivers/before dev stack installed/etc). However, on the mac side I'm not sure how to set this up. If I have a rather small OS X system partition, and a separate large data partition - can I map my user folder over to the large partition? I would like to be able tinker with my mac os x install without risking my user data. I'm building a new machine next week based on a number of posts from members here who seem to be having good success (BJMoose, etc). I went with the badaxe 2, E6600, 4gig ddr2, and 2x 320gb SATA drives and will be dual booting. One of those drives will be for OS x and the other for Windows. I will be running a lot of VMWare Fusion to host Windows XP in OS X - I'm guessing it's better to have the VMWARE virtual machine image on a separate drive from OS X for performance. So I'm planning on making a small partition on the windows drive to hold the VM files. Now for the dedicated OS X drive (320gig), what partitioning scheme makes sense? My main concerns are to separate my data from my OS partition and hopefully be able to easily image/restore the OS X partition. I have no idea how big the system partition on OS X needs to be - 30g? 60g? Or maybe there is another better way to do this? Thanks for any help! Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/61907-partitioning-strategy/ Share on other sites More sharing options...
phanguy Posted August 30, 2007 Share Posted August 30, 2007 osx actually takes up quite a bit of space if you do a complete install, but since you'll be "making" your mac, you'll have to do a custom install in which you'll see the files that you can deselect. in any case, i would suggest at LEAST 20-30 gigs. i'd personally make a bigger one because of installing programs and whatnot. you'll be able to easily restore your osx if you need to. you could just partition part of your drive and keep your backup on it unless that's what you were already planning. partitioning using the stock software is alright but there are better ones out there, i personally partitioned using acronis while running windows, but you should be fine using the Disk Utility program. good luck man. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/61907-partitioning-strategy/#findComment-438859 Share on other sites More sharing options...
BJMoose Posted August 30, 2007 Share Posted August 30, 2007 Phanguy is right, OSX will take up a bit of space, but more than that, applications will also take more space than they do in windows. If you intend to install stuff like Final Cut Studio, Adobe Production Premium, and MS Office and all the content that comes with those programs, you might want at least 65gb for your OS partition. I've read a lot of posts where people have set up their systems with 10-20gb only to have to rebuild their system disks because they needed more space. BTW, you're a person after my own heart. I thought I was the only person who made several images of his system at various stages to always a quick, clean starting point for any changes I want to make. I usually have a basic image, one that's tweaked with all my utilities, and one each after any major suite that I install with all updates and upgrades. Not quite so easy to do that on a Hackintosh, although on my Mac Pro I can do it with CopyCatX. To back up my Hack, I use Symantec Ghost 12. Because the OSX partition is HFS+, Ghost won't just copy the data on the partition, it copies the whole partition so the images are larger. A 60gb partition will wind up being about 35gb as an image. I devote a spare external drive for all my OSX images. Good luck. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/61907-partitioning-strategy/#findComment-438891 Share on other sites More sharing options...
tasc Posted August 31, 2007 Author Share Posted August 31, 2007 Thanks for the tips guys, much appreciated. BJMoose is your system partition 65gb? If so, I'm guessing that will be plenty for my needs. As far as putting your user folders on another partition, is this generally the process everyone follows? http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?sto...007041217125440 And lastly, should all your os x partitions be Mac OS Extended (Journaled)? I think I'm looking at doing the following: #1 320gb drive: 60gb [os x system] Mac OS Extended Journaled 260db [os x user] Mac OS Extended Journaled #2 320gb drive: 30gb [windows xp] NTFS 260gb [windows user data] NTFS (also store osx system ghost images here) 30gb [os x user VMware space] Mac OS Extended Journaled Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/61907-partitioning-strategy/#findComment-438947 Share on other sites More sharing options...
SDRacer48 Posted August 31, 2007 Share Posted August 31, 2007 just a suggestion, you may want a 10 or so gig FAT32 Share partition. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/61907-partitioning-strategy/#findComment-438960 Share on other sites More sharing options...
phanguy Posted August 31, 2007 Share Posted August 31, 2007 yeah, you'll need a fat32 in case you plan on sharing any files between both oses. otherwise you should use journaled to format your drives. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/61907-partitioning-strategy/#findComment-438963 Share on other sites More sharing options...
BJMoose Posted August 31, 2007 Share Posted August 31, 2007 Thanks for the tips guys, much appreciated. BJMoose is your system partition 65gb? If so, I'm guessing that will be plenty for my needs. Actually, I have a 126gb partition for OSX, and after everything I have is installed, I have about 50gb left. But I have a ton of 500gb hard drives so saving space isn't a problem for me. Another option for overall partitioning instead of FAT32 is to have a separate hfs+ partition for all your OSX data needs and install MacDrive7 on your Windows PC. FAT32 limits your file sizes to 4gb and for me that's a hassle with video editing where I'm often dealing with 32+gb DV files. MacDrive allows you to read/write from HFS+ partitions quickly and easily. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/61907-partitioning-strategy/#findComment-438973 Share on other sites More sharing options...
tasc Posted August 31, 2007 Author Share Posted August 31, 2007 Do you guys actually remap your /Users directory to another partition? Or do you just use the other partitions for general storage and reference them as needed, leaving everything intact on your system/boot drive? For example, in windows I never actually liked mapping the "Documents and Settings" folder to my data partition - windows always wanted to create too much {censored} in there that I didn't want. So I just used the data partition as separate and told applications to use that partition manually when loading/saving files. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/61907-partitioning-strategy/#findComment-439004 Share on other sites More sharing options...
phanguy Posted August 31, 2007 Share Posted August 31, 2007 bjmoose, i also use macdrive, it's one of my favorite programs! though i think one day, when i have a bit of extra money, i'll have to actually purchase it. though i've been having some funky problems with my drives as of late, but nothing too horrid. tasc, if you are going to make a separate partition for your mac then i think moving your users directory would be a good idea. i would have done that as well but found out about that too late. now i'm stuck with the wrong folder icons in my finder side bar! =P Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/61907-partitioning-strategy/#findComment-439401 Share on other sites More sharing options...
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