Mac Pro :: 1 Big Partition Or Separate For OS / Data?
Jul 1, 2010
I have a Mac Pro 1,1 (2007) with the Apple RAID Card and 3 500GB drives in RAID 5. This leaves a total of about 1TB space, which [for historical reasons] is split into two 500GB partitions - one with the OS and home directories, the other with project data. I just received an additional 500GB drive matching the 3 already present, which I intend to add to the array -- bringing the total space available to 1.5 TB. Since I need to backup and restore the filesystem to expand the array, this is the perfect opportunity to revisit my partitioning scheme.
The problem with the current scheme is that I often find myself in the situation where I am working on a project, and one partition is full, but the other has plenty of space - so I end up wasting a lot of time moving files from partition to partition to get things done. So no matter what, I know that I want to combine the home directories and project data on one large partition. The question is should I have:
1) A separate small partition for the OS and a large one for everything else?
2) One giant partition for everything?
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Mar 24, 2009
I have read that it is very helpful to separate the applications programs on one disk or volume and place the data on a separate disk or volume..as described below:
"Avoid putting your data (images, spreadsheets, documents, music) on the same volume as your system, and preferably not even on the same physical drive as your system (eg a partition on the same drive as the system). It�s one thing for a hard drive to fail; it�s quite another to have both the system and your data gone." This is from the [URL] website.
My system has multiple hard drives, but this newbie is wondering how actually I accompany this.. do I simply save the photos, spreadsheets , etc , onto the different drive as I am working with them within the applications?
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Apr 29, 2010
I have seen that is rare in the Mac community to define a secondary partition on disk to hold the Home Directory leaving a partition for the operating system only. I would like to know your opinion on the matter of having a partition for the Home Directory as in my case it brought many benefits to me like every time you need to try a new installation of Mac OS from scratch, you must format the partition, which involves obtaining a prior backup of the entire contents of the Home Directory for later recall. This is not necessary if the Home Directory has its own partition. So do the Settings are also conserved. What do you think about it?, Do any of you use a separate partition for your Home Directory?
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Sep 4, 2010
I am getting my MacBook Pro from my college in the next few days and for a while now I have been thinking how I will listen to my music. My college likes to have the best of both worlds so they install Windows 7 right onto the hard drive before I get it. I have a zune and I highly prefer using the zune software as opposed to itunes. I also like having the option to listen to music on both OS's.
I was thinking about storing my media on a separate partition of the hard drive that is in a format that would work and is readable/writeable on both OS's.
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Aug 15, 2009
Quick question - I currently run Vista off of Boot Camp; is Parallels a fairly straightforward installation that then lets me launch Vista off of my Boot Camp partition, or do I need to reinstall Vista onto another (separate) partition for Parallels?
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Jun 23, 2012
I am re-organizing after a move to mac and decided to move all my data to a raid array while keeping my OS's on a separate drive.
i am seeing that this is more difficult in practice than it sounds.
for instance, i have all sorts of folders such as Music or Screenshots or Pictures or Movies etc, etc, etc and i am wondering if I should just keep ALL of this dat on the separate drive and RE-POINT all my software that uses a database to that folder on the other drive.
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Nov 30, 2014
I am running OS X Yosemite 10.10.1. I have two drives on my MacBook Pro 17-inch, mid 2010. One is 500 GB and one is 80 GB. The system was installed on the 80GB drive and my home folder was on the 500GB drive. Having the "Home" folder on a separate partition was causing all kinds of permission problems. So, I did a clean install of Yosemite and want to put everything on the 500GB drive. Â
When I go to restore from Time Machine, it tells me it can't restore the "Home" account because it is on a separate drive. Then, of course, I can't login to that account on the restored system – I get an error "can't log in to that account due to an error." Â
How do I restore and associate the backed up "Home" folder to the new "Home" account on the restored drive? The names of the users are exactly the same on the backup as on the "Home" account on the restored drive.Â
Info:
MacBook Pro, OS X Yosemite (10.10.1)
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Oct 1, 2008
I have a single boot disk with just the apps on, and 2 disks in a software mirrored RAID in which I keep all the important stuff.Its just occurred to me, if the boot drive fails won't the software RAID be destroyed as well?Or will it be easy to recover the data off one of the previously RAID1 disks, when the new boot drive is installed?
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Mar 31, 2012
I have an iMac 27 (end of year 2009) I5.It has 1 TB internal and I want to replace it with a 2 TB internal. I have time machine backups on an external hard drive that has been connected via Firewire. I have another iMac (my son's)Imac 24 Intel Core 2 Duo that has it's own separate Time machine backup to it's own separate firewire connected external drive.Both machines are completely up to date with the latest version of Lion and all other necessary software updates.When the internal hardrive is replaced - I want to use my latest time machine backup to create one profile on the imac and then use my son's latest time machine back up for a second profile.The end goal being to have everything from my current set up ie: apps, documents, itunes, etc existing in one profile and everything in my son's current set up existing in the other profile.We can both be administrators for the time being as well.I should note even though we both have some of the same apps, we both also have other apps that the other does not.
My profile will be using about 900 gigs of total space.My son's profile will be using about 250 gigs of total space.This is temporary until the new iMac is released.Then I will want to transfer my profile to that leaving my son's intact on the iMac 27 I5.I realize that during the temporary period that Time Machine will be making backups of this entire two profile setup, which I am now understanding as I write this will create a new issue for me when I want to transfer only my profile to the new computer as well.But one bridge to cross at a time, I guess.I need to do this because we must bring his current computer to my father - as his iMac G5 is inoperable. We have been doing this round robin hand me down in our family since IMac DV special edition :-)
Info:
iMac (27-inch Late 2009), Mac OS X (10.7.3)
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May 14, 2009
My wife and I each have iPods and each have our own computers with our own iTunes libraries. We have a wireless router and want to play music from our computers to a hifi system. If I purchase an Airport Express, is it possible that my wife and I can both play music from our separate computers to the one Airport Express Base Station (obviously not at the same time)?
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May 14, 2012
Can I use Automator to put seperate files into seperate folder
Info:
Automator, iOS 5.1.1
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Feb 21, 2009
I tried searching the boards already but I didn't get a clear answer I was looking for.
So I have an external harddrive with data already on (it takes up only 40% of the harddrive). Now, I want to partition the harddrive and use the new partition for a Time Machine backup of my Mac.
Now, here's the question; would I be able to delete the Time Machine partition in the future and still leave the external harddrive's data (the original 40% of data I had in the first partition?
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Dec 19, 2008
I haven a MBP and a Western Digital 500gb Hd formatted in FAT32. Now what i want to do is partition a 100gig of that FAT32 space into Mac OSX Extended, so I can copy files larger than 4gb. These 100gb are free but on the rest of the HD is data. Is it possible to partion it without losing my 300gb of data.
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Oct 17, 2010
As I was trying to install Arch Linux on my Mac (dual-booting), I accidentally deleted my Mac partition! To add insult to injury, the version of linux I downloaded was the wrong one, so I couldn't even have that. I reintalled Mac 10.5 (I have the 10.6 cd, just haven't reinstalled that one yet), and now I want desperately to recover from the old partition.
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Jul 5, 2009
I know there are already a ton of threads like this one out there, I was just getting a lot of conflicting data from them, and didn't really want to screw this up... Well here's the problem.My HDD is currently divided into two partitions, I am trying to shrink the 2nd partition, and expand the 1st without losing the data on my 2nd partition. Is this Possible?
I've tried VolumeWorks 1.5 from a bootable DVD but for some reason when I open it and select my hard drive, the left column where a list of my partitions should be is blank, and all the buttons on the bottom are blanked out except "close" and "rebuild".
I was going to try booting from CD and running disk utility to accomplish this, but most of the stuff I've read says that shrinking a partition with DU will erase the data. ?
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Aug 8, 2010
OS X 10.6, 2 USB hard disks (magnetic, not SSDs), Data Rescue 3.
I used Data Rescue to clone a dying 120GB hard disk with a single partition to a healthy 500GB hard disk. The healthy disk now just reads as a 500GB hard disk with a SINGLE 120GB partition, as expected. I then aimed a deep scan at the 120GB PARTITION on the 500GB drive.
Question: Could the scan have picked up files that had been previously deleted on the healthy 500GB disk, WHICH WOULD CURRENTLY RESIDE OFF THE NEW RECOVERED PARTITION?
The reason I ask if because I don't want to mix files recovered from the dying hard disk with my own files that I previously may have had on the healthy 500GB disk.
Another quick question: are partitions continuous on a disk, or can they be on sectors physically scattered around the disk?
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Jun 24, 2012
I would like to partition my internal 750GB HD into two parts. One for Media, and one for the OS and applications.
Is this possible without data loss? If so How? Should I clone my Macbook, reinstal the OS, and partition, then move media into the partition?
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Jan 20, 2008
i have an external drive that's 1TB that i use for all sorts of things but Time Machine as well.having read that the time machine backup tends to increase over time i'd like to make a partition for it, just like others have done in topics i've read.
the question is this,can i make a sub-partition of, say 100GB using disk utility or something but not lose data from my drive?
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Jan 20, 2009
I recently partitioned my harddrive for windows xp to be installed with bootcamp but now I would rather run VMware fusion. I haven't yet backed up my hard drive. Is there anyway to return to previous settings without losing it all? I have a lot of stuff on my computer is why I ask. Also, if I made a backup of my computer now, will that not work because I am doing so with a partitioned drive?
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Feb 13, 2009
I currently have a 750GB HFS+ disk (system) which has about 300GB of data on it. I want to add 2 partitions to it - ideally without having to copy everything off, wiping it, adding the new partition setup and copying everything back.I seem to remember there was a utility that did this - or am I imagining it?Also, the 2 partitions I want to add are PC partitions - so my disk will end up looking something like...
465GB HFS+
200GB NTFS
32GB FAT 32If I can do this, what is the best way to format these partitions in these PC formats?And what is the best way of cloning my current PC partitions (on a different disk) and copying them over to the new PC partitions that I will be adding to my system disk?
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Sep 30, 2009
So not even a year into owning my shiny MBP 15.4, the OSX partition crashed and I lost everything. Lesson learned, I need to buy a nice external HD to backup my stuff. So here are my questions for you guys. What is a nice portable small external HD... one I don't need to plug into the wall and the computer, pref around 320GB. Also I am going to freshly install OSX 10.6 so I think its time to go from 2GB to 4GB, what is the best RAM for my MBP 15.4 2.4GHz Unibody and where should I pick that up from?
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Jul 12, 2010
So I tried to install XP on my MacBook Pro via Boot Camp and it didn't go so well. To make a long story short, my OSX partition and Windows partition were both deleted so I re-installed OSX. When I went to re-intall OSX I could not choose a HDD to install it on, so thinking it was the right idea I created a new partition and continued the installation. After installation everything seemed fine so I went to restore from time machine, which I did. The only problem is I now have 100 GB of data on my computer, but it apparently doesn't exist as I can't see, or access any of it.
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Apr 13, 2012
i have mac mini, but this is one partition. I want to create partition of disc, but i doughtful that when i create partition, data and software will delete. Can i create partition without data loss.
Info:
Mac mini, Mac OS X (10.7.3)
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Feb 28, 2010
I would never opened a topic like this if I had not a similar experience with expanding 'dmg' in the past!
A truly bad experience! It is supposed that using 'disk utility' I can resize-expand-make bigger any dmg file. Every time I tried it, it was a totally fail process.The 'disk image' dmg did not resized at all.
I do not know why, it just happened to me many times.
Does anyone had similar experience? Any solution to this? So if I have a dmg that need to be bigger, I create a new one from scratch and I copy paste files from the old dmg.I need to do the same with hard disk partitions, using disk utility once again. I need to resize my hard disk partitions.Does this process works well as it should be, or it is a bad-implemented feature?
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Apr 21, 2010
I tried to install Ubuntu (don't ask me why) onto my G5 dual core 2.5 Ghz PowerPC and after the installation not working as I had hoped (it worked fine on my netbook btw) I switched off the mac using a hard-shutdown from the power button as the whole system became completely unresponsive. I then tried to reboot and found that on my reboot rather than booting into the user screen as per usual I got the dreaded "circle with a cross through it". After fiddling about with a hell of alot of boot options I managed to get into the open firmware (option,o,f) terminal style screen up. from this screen it would seem that on my internal hard drive that pretty much all of my files are still on the hard drive. As I couldn't open them from the open firmware I was then told by a friend that I could run disk utility from the install cd provided with mac os x and I managed to find my internal hard drive using disk utility.
It seems as though during the ubuntu install I've deleted all partitions on the hard drive and therefore on the "partition" section under "current" it has no partitions set up and I have the option to set one up. It also gives me various different formating options; Mac os x Extended, Mac os x Extended (journalled), Mac os x Extended (Case sensitive journalled), Mac os x Extended (Case sensitive), unix file system and free space. I think it was originally on Mac os x Extended (journaled) but I'm not certain. Before I hit that re-partition button do u think that this is the right thing to do and if so which formatting option should I use? Presuming that the re-partitioning goes well, will I then have to re-install os x? Also will I loose all the data on the hard drive? Although I have the vast majority backed up there are still a few odd files that I wouldn't mind keeping if at all possible and obviously I didn't think to back up those hundreds of apps I've acquired over the years.
An embarrassed Dc
Power Mac G5 dual-core at 2.5 GHz (OS X 10.4.11)
Internal Hard drive: Serial ATA Maxtor 6B250S0
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Apr 21, 2010
We have a client who has a MAC Mini running OS X. System is not booting into the OS, its freezing up during boot process. Data on the hard drive is critical to the user.
- The hardware utility on the OS X install cd says there's no problems, but when removed from the mini, connected to a PC, and tested using bootable cd IBM Drive Fitness Test and Seagate Seatools, the drive fails both tests.
- The drive has been connected to our data transfer system (running Windows XP) and unsurprisingly XP sees the drive in disk managment, but doesn't see the partition in Explorer.
- Research online led us to HFSExplorer, which dies see the MAC partition and file tree. But any attempt to extract files results in a Java runtime error saying that the source cannot be accessed. Once this error is received, HFSExplorer crashes and must be relaunched, and will not detect the MAC partition again until the computer is hard shutdown and restarted. THe physical drive vanishes from disk managment when the error occurs also.
- Further research led us to MacDrive, which mounts the drive (after reporting that it detected an error and asking if we still want to mount). We can again browse the file tree, but as soon as we attempt to copy anything, it fails and the explorer window with the MAC partiton vanishes. Again, the system must be hard restarted in order to restore access to the partition.
- Found a repair utility in the MACDrive program. Running that results in the error "80070002: The system cannont find the file specified."
- I'm out of ideas at this point.
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May 17, 2012
I am considering making a w7 partition with bootcamp to use for gaming and game making, but am not sure how much data to put on it. I have a total of 250gb on my hard drive and 175.23 gb available. I'll still use my mac side for a lot of things so I want sufficient data on there. On the topic of hard drive expansions, I have many external drives so if I could use one of those to expand my hard drive I'd be willing to?
Info:
Mac OS X (10.6.8)
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Dec 6, 2014
I have an external hard drive that is about one third full. Can I now partition it into 2 partitions in which the existing data is in Partition 1, and Partition 2 is empty and available for new, different data?
Info:
iMac, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2)
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Nov 11, 2009
Been a Mac convert now for about a year and haven't really looked back. So far the only thing keeping me from going straight Mac is Quicken. Hopefully this spring Intuit will get the latest Quicken for Mac right, but I digress. I am currently running VM3 to boot into Windows 7 in order to use Quicken, and a few other things from time to time. But this new Modern Warfare 2 game kinda has me thinking I might need to install Windows 7 via Boot Camp in order to give it a try. With that said, if I install W7 via BC I'm I able to access the data on my Mac partition, and with full read/write access? Furthermore, do I understand correctly that VM will then allow me to access my BC install from within it, thereby having the best of both?
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Jun 15, 2010
I have a 500GB external HD but a 250HD on my macbook. is it possible to partition the HD 300GB for time machine and 200 for storage of data and files? If so, how would I go about doing that? I just don't want to waste a 500 GB external if my HD is only 250GB.
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