Evan Kleiman
- 2002.01.21
Q. What's the deal with partitioning? What does it
do?
A. Every computer has a hard drive these days; some have more
than one. Those who own iMacs, PowerBooks, and iBooks, as well as
many with Power Macs, will only have one internal hard drive.
But what if you want to have your single drive function as many
separate hard drives?
There are many reasons partitioning your hard drive. Most people
do it because they want to install a different OS on their system,
such as Unix, Linux, or even OS X, while still have the
convenience of OS 8 or 9 (or even lower) at their
disposal.
Another good reason to partition is the ability to keep a live
backup of your current operating system on another drive, just in
case you're customizing your main OS and mess up (sort of like me)
- then all you need to do is copy the clean System Folder from your
back-up drive onto your main drive. Time saved: About 30-40
minutes, that is if you even know where your backup disks are.
People also do this because they want to get into video editing,
don't need for a new hard drive, but want some separate space to
store unfinished movies.
Now that you have some of the reasons for partitioning, how do
you do it?
You should know that partitioning your drive reformats it, so
you need to back-up all vital data before starting, since you
will not be able to get it back once your drive has been
partitioned and reformatted.
Okay, and now that we're done with the hard drive safety speech,
we can begin the process.
First, you need to boot your computer off of something other
than the hard drive you wish to partition - usually your bootup or
restore CD, a floppy disk, a anything else that can boot the
system. iMac, G3, and G4 users should make sure that they are using
the "Software Restore" CDs instead of the "Software Install" disks,
as only they will have the applications you will be needing.
Otherwise you can use the "disk tools" floppy from System 7.5 for
older Macs or the "OS 9.0 Installation" CD from newer Macs.
To boot from a CD, be sure it's in the drive and hold the "C"
key on your keyboard during startup. Now you can either launch the
Apple HD SC (used on older Macs) application or the Drive Setup
application.
Now select your hard drive and click the initialize button. Some
users will then see a "formatting options" button - click this and
you should see a window with a large rectangle in it. This
rectangle represents your hard drive. You can now divide your hard
drive into as many partitions as you see fit (up to 8).
In the end, partitioning is a great way to distribute your free
disk space to better organize your world or backup your life.
Next time we'll look at making one hard drive from many: the
RAID array.
Further Reading
