Starting Over...Please help!

[The Mighty Burner]

Hi DUC -

I'm hoping some of you can help me. Having not been able to solve my "disk too slow or fragmented" and "cannot allocate disk space" problems by initializing my external hard drive and updating drivers, I decided to wipe my system disk and do a clean install of my OS and hardware drivers.

The plan was to wipe the system disk and make three partitions: one startup disk for OS9.x, one startup disk for OSX (which I will be getting for PT 6.0), and one partition for backing up my audio from my firewire drive. Now the confusion begins...

I was able to initialize and set up my partitions no problem. I then installed my OS (which is 9.0.4). After installing the OS, I wanted to update it to 9.2.2. I went to the apple website, and if I read things correctly, I had to first update to 9.1, then 9.2.1, then 9.2. So I downloaded the OS9.1 updater installer, booted up from the CD again, and ran the updater. After it finished, the computer would not boot up...it kept hanging up on the desktop backround and would never finish booting up and mounting all my desktop icons. So I went back to the startup CD and installed 9.0.4 on my second partition. The computer booted up no problem, and I began installing my hardware drivers and related software. I plan on doing a clean install of PT5.1 tonight, and here are my lingering questions:

1) What can I do about the startup disk (the one I tried updating from OS9.0.4 to OS9.1)? Can I reinitialize only the single partition? Could I then download and install 9.2.2 directly, for free, from the apple website? Can I install another OS to a clean partition at any time? Should I expect problems running dual startup disks? Am I going about this all wrong?

2) Can I get the most current version of OMS for free from Opcode? Will it recognize my backed up studio setup documents?

3)If I want to remove a program, exactly which components do I need to find and trash...the program folder, it's preferences, and any related extensions?

4) How do I install a different OS (and other programs) without having certain programs (like quicktime and IE) install twice? After I unsuccessfully tried to update the first OS and then reinstalled 9.0.4 on another partition, I ended up with two icons for mail, IE, and quicktime. I realize I need to have the proper programs on each startup disk, but how do I manage them? Can I have two separate desktops, one for each OS?

5) In order to maximize system performance, I am trying this: partioning my firewire Glyph drive into three partitions (which should reduce access times), and then using the round robin method of disk allocation across those three partitions....this should further reduce access times and increase system performance, right?

The final goal is to keep my system simple and clean, with dual startup disks (one for OS9.x and one for OSX), and then to use the third partition on my system drive to back up the Glyph firewire drive when I want to do maintainance and reinitialize).

Does this plan make sense? Can anyone offer me some guidance?

I really appreciate it...thank you very kindly in advance for responding.

Happy holidays,

[silverlode]

1. You can initialize a partition. You should use the Software Update control panel to get up to the OS you want. Not sure, but you might only be able to get to 9.1.x, as I think the 9.2.x updates relate only to how OS 9 interacts with OS X. Could be wrong there. Different partitions are like different volumes. You should not have any problems having different OS's on different partitions. In fact, OS 9 and OS X are designed to co-exist on one volume.

2. Opcode doesn't exist anymore. The lastest version of OMS should be on your PT install CD. Yes it will recognize your old studio files.

3. Completely removing a program...depends on the application. If your talking about IE...the program folder, and a folder in your preferences folder named "Explorer".

4. OS 9 automatically installs apps like Outlook Express, IE, and Netscape. Understand that each volume has it's own desktop file, and in OS 9, every mounted volume's desktop folder contents gets displayed. Usually these are just aliases, though, and can be trashed without consequence. But if you went ahead and initialized the other partition, this problem would dissappear.

5. You're going partiton crazy. Partitions were useful when operating systems couldn't recognize volumes larger than 2 gigs. They're logically useful for certain operating systems (that is, the OS needs a swap partition, a root partition, etc.) I can't see any benefit to you, other that the way you organize things, in partitioning. I don't think it will make for a cleaner, faster system. One hard drive can only read and write so fast.

My PT system contains one 60 gig HD with OS 9, OS x, PT, all apps, everything, on one partition. It's been working flawlessly for the past year.

Silverlode.