Tips
Partitioning in Tiger
Partitioning a hard drive is the process of dividing a hard drive into separate, discrete sections, called 'volumes'. You can create up to 16 different partitions on a single hard drive, each one can be of different size and format, even including the 'MS-DOS' format for use with PCs on a network. With hard drives getting bigger there are reasons why you might want to partition a hard drive. Partitioning can be used for organization purposes, i.e., each volume could be used as a media (scratch) drive in a program like Final Cut Pro. It can also be used to separate your data from the OS system files, so should your OS crash to the point of needing to be reinstalled you can be back up an running in a fraction of the time it would take to restore your system using only one partition for both system files and user data.
Formatting
When you purchase a new hard drive for your Mac, either SATA/ATA (internal) or FireWire (external) the box that the drive comes in will likely tell you that the drive will run on both Macs and PCs. This is true, but because the drive is formatted for cross platform compatibility, some stability and facility issues could arise. It is possible that your new cross platform hard drive could have a 2 gig file size limit. So using the drive for video editing could cause problems. 2 gigs is good for about 9 minutes of uncompressed video capture. Capturing clips longer than 9 minutes could result in the captured clip being broken into separate files. So ... whether you intend to partition your hard drive or not, you really should reformat your new hard drive for the Mac. If your new hard drive is FireWire and you intend to use it with both Macs and PCs, then leave it as is and do not reformat.
If you are going to partition your new drive you can skip down to the Partition section below, as when you partition your hard drive, you will reformat the drive during the partition process.
- After you plugin your new hard drive and attach it to
your Mac via a FireWire cable, the hard drive will mount
on your desktop.
- Open Disk Utility. Applications folder > Utilities
folder > Disk Utility. Select the hard drive in the
left hand column and click on the Erase tab.
- In the Volume Format drop-down menu, select Mac OS
Extended (Journaled) if you plan to place the Mac Tiger
operating system on this drive to make it a bootable
drive. Select Mac OS Extended if you plan to use the
drive as a media (capture scratch) drive.
- Name the drive.
- Install Mac OS 9 Disk Driver
There is an option to Install Mac OS 9 Disk Drivers. If you plan on using the hard drive with a Mac booting from OS 9, or believe that this might be a possibility, then select the checkbox to install the Mac OS 9 drivers. You do not need to install the Mac OS 9 drivers to use the disk with the Classic environment.
- Security Options. When the default setting 'Don't
Erase Data' is used, only the Directory information
(information used to locate files on the hard drive) is
erased leaving the actual files intact. This means, that
for awhile, there is the possibility of recovering files.
Over time the files will be over-written with new files
thus destroying the data. For the paranoid there are
three additional settings to insure that no data can be
recovered from the hard drive.
- Once you have selected the format and have named the
drive, click on Erase. You will be presented with the
'Are you Sure' dialog box. Note that the volume still has
the name 'untitled' because the process has not yet run.
After 'Erase' the name will change to your new name.
- Click the Erase button again. The Erase process will take just a minute to erase and reformat your new drive.
Partitioning
With the new drive mounted, open Disk Utility. Applications folder > Utilities folder > Disk Utility. Select the hard drive in the left hand column and click on the Partition tab. The drive will be displayed as one volume, 'Untitled'.
- In the 'Volume Scheme' drop down, select the number
of partitions you want to have. For this example I have
selected 2 partitions.
- Click in the top partition box to select it. Enter a
name for this partition (External Boot) and from the
'Format' drop down menu select "Mac OS Extended
Journaled". We do want Journaling turned on for a boot
drive or volume.
- I have the "Install Mac OS 9 Disk Drivers" box
checked. These drivers should be installed for machines
that can boot into OS 9. If OS 9 drivers aren't present
on the drive, you can't mount that drive from a machine
running OS 9. If you want to boot into OS9 from this
drive, or access it while booted into OS 9 from another
drive/partition, its imperative that you install OS 9
drivers when you initialize or partition. Even for
systems that don't boot into OS 9 it is a good idea; its
possible to mount such a drive via Firewire T mode from
another machine, which can come in handy in rare
maintenance situations. It doesn't hurt to have those
drivers there, and you never know when you might need
them.
- Now select the second partition, give it a name and
set Format to Mac OS Extended (Journaling off) as this
volume will be used as a Capture Scratch drive. Note that
Mac OS 9 drives are installed on this volume as well.
- Now it's time to size each of the partitions. Place
your cursor in between the two partitions, it will turn
into a up/down arrow. Click and drag up or down to change
the size of the partition, (red arrow below). As you
drag, the new size of the 'selected' partition will be
reflected in the 'Size' box, (blue arrow below).
- Repeat the above process for each of your intend partitions. Once you have set partitions, named, sized, and selected formats, click on the Partition button. Your drive will be partitioned. This process will only take a few seconds. Be aware that when you partition a drive all information on that drive will be lost, so be sure to back up any data that you wish to preserve.
Journaling
When Journaling is turned on for a drive or volume, a continuous record (a journal) is created by the Mac OS, of the work that you do, i.e., opening, saving , deleting files, etc. If your Mac crashes or goes down do to a power failure, upon reboot, Journaling will help the Mac OS to get back up and running.
You can turn Journaling on, at any time, for any drive or volume. In Disk Utility, select the drive in the left hand column, then, from the Disk Utility tool bar click on 'Enable Journaling'. Once a drive or partition has Journaling turned on, the only way to turn it off would be to Erase the drive or partition and set the Format to Mac OS Extended (no Journaling).
Ignore Ownership
When you have finished formatting and partitioning your new hard drive, there is one more chore. If you plan to use this new drive as a 'media drive' for storage rather than as a Mac OS X System boot drive, you may want to insure that all files on this drive will always be read-write accessible to everyone (all Users), even when the drive is moved to a different Mac. This is important for Firewire hard drives being used as media (scratch) drives for FCP and other apps, as it will make the drive and its files accessible (read-write) on any Mac. To accomplish this, select the hard drive icon on the desktop and 'command i' from the keyboard which will open the 'info' dialog box. At the bottom of the window, make sure that the 'Ignore ownership on this volume' box is checked. If this drive is to be used as a Mac OS X System boot drive, never select "Ignore ownership".
UNIX
A word of caution, the Mac OS X has UNIX at its core. There is one keyboard item that is reserved for UNIX exclusively. It is the forward slash, (/). Never use the forward slash in the name of a drive or partition, file, folder, bin, project, sequence or anywhere else for that matter.
(reprinted from kenstone.net)
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