How do I Install Mountain Lion on a Mac with 2 Drives

Question

Good day ALL,
I am upgrading my Mac mini to add a second hard drive (solid state).  After the HD install is complete I plan to re-install Mountain Lion and transfer my Applications, Files, etc from my backup.  I am very comfortable with installing Mountian Lion on the solid state drive and making it the bootbale drive, my questions are:
1.  It is a 120G soloid state hard drive, so I only plan to use it for the OSX system, Library and Applications.  Should I include other files?
2.  I plan to use my 750G SATA drive for the Users.  How do I set up the User Folder archive on this drive?  Do I just move it?
3.  Then how do I ensure the User Folder on my backup, gets retored on the right drive?
Thanks

Answer 1

GreyWullf wrote:
Good day ALL,
I am upgrading my Mac mini to add a second hard drive (solid state).  After the HD install is complete I plan to re-install Mountain Lion and transfer my Applications, Files, etc from my backup.  I am very comfortable with installing Mountian Lion on the solid state drive and making it the bootbale drive, my questions are:
1.  It is a 120G soloid state hard drive, so I only plan to use it for the OSX system, Library and Applications.  Should I include other files?
2.  I plan to use my 750G SATA drive for the Users.  How do I set up the User Folder archive on this drive?  Do I just move it?
3.  Then how do I ensure the User Folder on my backup, gets retored on the right drive?
Thanks
Regarding 1:
$ cd /Users. sudo ditto myname /Volumes/TimeMachine/myname  copies everything in $HOME to non-TM backup.
Ensured latest SSD firmware up to date.
Clean install of ML to SSD from 8GB USB stick created by Lion Diskmaker.
$ cd /Users. sudo ditto /Volumes/TimeMachine/myname myname (see part 2 for /Users on another drive)
Added latest Xcode and command-line tools. Added VirtualBox 4.1.20. Put the 65GB VirtualBoxVMs folder on the second drive. Edited the ~/Library/Virtualbox/VirtualBox.xml file for the new mount points. Beware that many SSD (including Vertex) warn not to exceed 50% drive capacity or they will invoke slower drive controller algorithm. After some clean-up and re-arrangement, I have 98GB free on this SSD. It sings.
Files that are heavily accessed/shared by users would be consideration for the SSD
Regarding 2:
If you have sufficient external storage, back-up your pre-ML /Users either with ditto as I did, or with TM, somewhere other than the 750GB drive.
Use DiskUtility and repartition the 750 as one (or more) GUID HFS+Journaled partitions depending on planned usage.
Reverse the back-up to put your user(s) on the 750GB drive
In System Preferences > Users & Groups, unlock, then right mouse button click on individual user names. Advanced options ... will appear. For Home directory, Choose ... the particular mount point for individual user accounts now on the 750GB drive. Done.
Regarding 3:
Because you have moved individual user accounts from the internal drive where your last TM backup occurred before ML installation, TimeMachine will not understand (as far as I know), the new /Volumes/750GB/User/you home directory location that you just changed in #2. Another reason I used ditto(1).
If you do not want Spotlight to index that 750GB drive, you need to inform Spotlight Preferences > Privacy to exclude the drive.
Hope this helps.
PS: Darn advanced editor eating bullet formatting!!
Message was edited by: VikingOSX