UN-partitioning a hard drive?

[brinaddison]

Well then you need to be without OS9. or make a small partition for it. You can't have your cake AND eat it. If you want 2 OS's on the same computer you need at least 2 partitions.

[Michael Cottrell]

If you want 2 OS's on the same computer you need at least 2 partitions.

Wrong again Batman.

[Animal]

Go into Disk Utility and create a "Disk Image" then store it on another drive or other media that's large enough and reformat and unpartition the original drive. When you are done, simply restore the "disk Image" onto the original drive. Works great and saves a lot of trouble.

I've done it many times without problems.

So let me get this straight: If each of the 3 partitions apears as a seperate "drive" on my desktop, do I drag all three, individually, onto the Disk Image utility to make images of them and then I'll have three seperate "disks" that I can restore on the new NON-partitioned drive? Or will it be a problem with three disk images and one new drive?

sorry for not getting it....

[qgrm]

Michael C. although not necessary, the partition for dual boot is recommended. Batman.

Am I the only person who backs up to cds? disk failure blows. B.

[koko]

Sure, no problem but will this target copy actually boot into 10.2 ?

See, I've been trying these last few days to produce a bootable volume tha's a 1:1 clone of my MacOS 10.2.8 boot drive.
I used PsynX and Deja Vu to source and Norton Utilities 8 to cure target copy. It didn't work out,
the target volume had massive major errors and booted up till "Waiting for Application Services" then stalled.
Even /sbin/fsck -y in safe boot did nothing to fix the stall, not to mention disk doctoring or warrioring.

And like Animal I don't really get it; I think you can't make a bootable clone copy of yourMacOS X boot volume in single user
mode simply with the Disk Copy utility alone. This would only work with MacOS 9 boot _volume_ (not Classic)
Also, I happen to have a bootable MacOS 9 System Folder on the same partition as MacOS X, I have a second MacOS 9 System on
a 2nd partition. This is because I used Retrospect to transfer MacOS9 volumes from my previous TiBook.

Now that was easssey, just suck up them volumes into retro4.3 archives, boot new TiBook in Target mode, format partitions
and blow 'em up from retro archs. Disk Doctor to check System Folder integrity and I had an EXACT bootable working
DAW on MacOS9 in like maybe 20 mins. Then I installed MacOS X on the 1st partition and everything has been stable.

So maybe that's the answer, upgrade or buy Retrospect 6 for some 130 .... or maybe I'll better give
the ole Disk Copy a shot tonite stead o th' ole bbburpey.

Also watch out for viruses and trojans especially at night and use only lubricated....err no in fact, use Sophos or NAV to sweep
your disk clean before cloning, I found two trojans buried in my java resources or jars or summink the other day. So
even MacOS X is not totally immune, how about spyware on your disks ? Is it really safe ?

CarbonCopy...carboncopycarboncopy, where art thou....

[brinaddison]

Michael C. are you going to back up your statement with some info............

Partition this ROBBIN!

You're not helping anyone with that kind of remark. And if you want your system to be unstable then go ahead and put two operating systems on one partition. How the hell are you going to boot up a dual boot computer and run a program like PT without having system conflicts. C'mon!

Animal, if you want to run a clean computer with no headachs just make a 10G partition for OS9 and put all your OS9 applications on that partition. Then with the remaining 30G partition will be used for OSX and OSX apps. When you make your Disc images just save them to your firewire drive as 2 disc images then restore them to the appropriate partition once you've cleaned out the drive and repartitioned it. It's not rocket science, it's just good practice. That way we won't have to answer a tone of mulfunctioning questions two days from now.

There are recomendations for a reason...that's your first clue.

As for ROBBIN? well say no more, he's a sidekick.

I'm not sure why you need 3 partitions? but if you're going to do that I would suggest just getting an additional internal HD say 80G and plan your layout for what you'll use in the future. It is not recomended to save media to the system drive. Just let the system drive run the system.

Anyway that's what I do and I have no problems. I work with huge movie files and huge PT sessions for full length movies so I don't mess around with Ghetto style Cr*p. Remember, Batman does live in a mansion not a tin shack like Robbin.

Sorry robbin! I couldn't resist.

[where02190]

1. It is absolutely unnecessary to have separate partitions for each OS. we have a Dual 1Ghz G-4 QS that has OS9.2.2, OSx 10.28 and OSx 10.3 all on teh same partition running jsut swell.

2. Itunes will play any compatible file from any drive.

[lamp]

What where said. I have iTunes on a 20gig partition "not boot drive" no problems.

[brinaddison]

iTunes is not an OS.

Seems like there are many trains of thought here so each to his own. I understand that one can run OS9 and OSx off the same partition but honestly I feel, since I keep things separated, they work a lot better.

Research a little more and make up your mind about the different points of view here. This was mine. Anyway the idea was to unpartition the drive in the first place without losing prefs and data.

Just make a disk image, it works fine. You don't need to buy software to do it.

[Animal]

Wow, lots of different schools of thought on this issue. Thanks for everybody's advice. I talked to the IT guys at my office job and they seem to think...no, they DO think that I should be able to run both OS's from the same drive without partitioning. Be that as it may, it seems like I may be able to sidestep this issue. If iTunes will, in fact, read mp3's from any drive, I can try to resize my third partition (first is for OS9, second for OSX) to 15 gigs.

Hm....must do more research.