Lion 10.7.4 on an external drive with 2 partitions

I have an external drive with 2 partitions one of which is used for Time Machine Backups. The other is 300 gigs and I want to install lion on it for study but the installer will not let me do that. It might be because of the larger partition that I use for Time machine but I don't see why as it is a separate volume on the same drive. I keep getting the not able to install the recovery HD message. I also made sure to erase and reformat the drive (journaled extended). Any ideas why I can't do this?

Hey Kap
Tried to shrink the volume by 2 gigs but I get a partition failed error: This operation requires a newer version of Mac OS X for this disk. I am running 10.6.8 on my cpu and the partition is empty as I erased it. also it is extended (journaled). I don't understand this message. wierd.

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Why can't brand new MacBookPro9,1 (OEM Mountain-Lion) boot from Snow Leopard on external drive, or internal partition?

Why can't brand new MacBookPro9,1 (OEM Mountain-Lion) boot from Snow Leopard on external drive, or internal partition?
Is this because of hardware changes? Or firmware changes? Or is it just and Apple Inc. administrative fiat?

@Steve Holton: Sorry Steve, but you're wrong about that one . I'm using 10.8 (purchased and downloaded) on the internal HD of this MBP8,3 (2.2 GHz, 17"), and I am also able to boot into 10.7.4 and 10.6.8 from external FW800 partitions.
However, I DO have problems with my MBP9,1. It came with 10.7.4 installed and ran fine. Then I purchased and installed 10.8. It ran fine but could no longer boot from 10.7.4 on an external partition. I then reinstalled 10.7.4 on the internal HD and discovered that it is still unable to boot (even 10.7.4) from an external FW800 partition.
One of Apple's Senior Support Advisors has done some remote troubleshooting but the case is still open and unresolved. An earlier Apple Support case suggested that when, I installed the downloaded copy of 10.8, there had been a "firmware update" (behind the scenes) that is now causing the problems with booting from my external partition(s). This apparently is "a bug": it is not what is supposed to happen.
So - I believe - "the problem" really has nothing to do with hardware capability. It is strictly about Apple's strategy for "managing its future customer base". If you don't like it - use something else - I am seriously considering Ubuntu as an alternative.
If there's a hidden caveat in all this it's probably "Read Appple's Licence Agreement VERY Carefully".

How can I back up to an external drive with three partitions using Time Machine?

I have an external drive connected to my MBPro. The external drive has three partitions: one dedicated to the MBPro, one dedicated to my iMac and one for Photos. How can I be sure that when I backup my MBPro, it does so to the dedciated partition?
Also, I eject each of the partition icons on my desktop through the Eject selection in Finder menu and then I turn off the external drive and disconnect it. However, when I connect and turn the external drive to start it up again, the a message comes up that it has not been ejected properly. How am I supposed to eject the partitions and drive?
Thanks for you helpl
Vernon

When you set up time machine you should select which partition to backup to, after that it should be automatic, mine is.
I have not encountered your second problem, after ejecting the disks do you immeadiatley switch the drives off or leave them for 10-15 seconds to let them write the info stored on the disk drives internal buffer to disk?
I usually use the CNTL Click on the drive and select eject, but that should not be any different than using the Finder menu.

Time Machine doesn't like external drives with multiple partitions

I've had a problem with Time Machine on both 10.5.0 & 10.5.1 - Time Machine could not create the initial backup regardless of all the things I tried.
I have a Powerbook with a 300Gb Maxtor connected via firewire 800. This drive had been partitioned into three partitions (which I've used with other backup tools without problem).
Apparently the problem I had been having with Time Machine was that there were three separate partitions on the external drive. As soon as I took a chance and wiped all of those partitions and made a single partition, everything was fine.
I had called Apple Tech Support shortly after I got Leopard and when I discovered the problem with Time Machine. I specifically asked if there would be a problem from the multiple partitions and they didn't think there would be, but they were sure. Looks like Apple was wrong.
If you are having problems with Time Machine with a drive that has multiple partitions, trying changing your external into a single partition drive.

You will note that I was referring to a Powerbook and the Apple Partition Scheme. There might be something different happening for Intel/GUID users.
10.5.1 did address other issues with other partition types. Time Machine seems to have trouble with certain partition schemes. I'm not surprised that multiple partitions and GUID works because of things like bootcamp. Apple probably tested specifically for that type of config. They may not have worked all the bugs out of multiple partitions on a Apple Partition Scheme.

Format External Drive with 2 partitions (NTFS & Mac OS Extended)

I have a 300GB external hard drive. I need to format it into 2 partitions so I can backup my PC and my Powerbook.
I need two partitions:
1 x Mac OS Extended 75GB
1 x NTFS 225GB
Does anyone know how to do this (possibly with 3rd party software)?
I have Partition Magic on the PC.
Thanks.
17" Powerbook G4 1.67 GHz Mac OS X (10.4.5)

greg:
I think you are more likely to get help if you post your topic in the hardware forum for the 17" G4 PB.
Good luck.
cornelius
PismoG4 550, 100GB 5400 Toshiba internal, 1 GB RAM; Pismo 500 OS (10.4.4) Mac OS X (10.4.5) Beige G3 OS 8.6

How do I format an external drive with mountain lion?

How do I format an external drive with mountain lion?

Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility
select the external drive in the left pane
partition and format in the right pane

Using the same external drive with Time Machine on new mac?

I recently got a new mac because my old one broke. Thankfully, I had a fresh backup on Time Machine ready to restore onto my new computer. But when I try to use Time Machine with my new computer, it keeps wanting to do a whole new backup. It won't recognize the latest backup to only add new or changed files.
Here's a breakdown of my events:
new computer
restore Time Machine on new computer at install
want to continue using the external drive with Time Machine from where I left off (only adding new files since the last backup) on my new computer
Time Machine wants to do a whole new backup
Question: How can I continue to use my existing external hard drive with Time Machine on my new computer, picking up where I left off (not a new, complete backup)?
My old computer was Snow Lepoard, my new one is Lion.

Bergers wrote:
new computer
restore Time Machine on new computer at install
That should have left a "trail" in your SystemMigration log, so Time Machine can figure out what happened and automatically "inherit" the old backups. But sometimes, obviously, that doesn't work.
Since it didn't, there's a chance you can do it manually. See #B6 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting.

External Drive with invisible files

I have a MAC OS Extended format hard drive that I am attempting to clean up to make room for transfering some data. I have removed all the visible folder and files, but both finder and Disk Utility show that there are over 173 GB of data (over 2 million files) still on the volume. The drive is a 500 GB LaCie that I partitioned into two equal parts of 250GB. The other Partition was used exclusively for TM Backups. I want to reformat the drive ( the old back up partition I dont care about). but I am afraid of erasing files that I can't see.
Is there such a thing as an invisible file?
How can I find out what they are and why they are taking up so much of the drive?
I did run DU to Verify the volume and it checks out with no errors.
It is possible that they could be windows files that we used with Parallels at one time. But we no longer use Parallels. I would think that I would be able to see them even if I can't open the files.
I am running Lion on an iMac. The external drive is connected with firewire.

If you want a cleared (erased) unpartitioned 500 GB drive, then do this:
Drive Partition and Format
1. Open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder.
2. After DU loads select the hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
3. Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from the drop down menu to one. Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID then click on the OK button. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Partition button and wait until the process has completed.
Yes, there are invisible files. The OS has thousands of them that are kept invisible to the user.

Installing Lion clean on hard drive with multiple partitions

I have a spring 2008 24" iMac running Snow Leopard.
I am about to put a new 2TB hard drive in it and after I do that I want to do a clean install of Lion on it.
I do not want to upgrade my Snow Leopard install to Lion. I will keep it on my back up drive as a fallback incase of serious workflow incompatiblities with the new OS.
For my workflow I create and use multiple partitions (Mac OS, Windows and multiple HFS+ for data) on my hard drive and I have seen that Lion creates it's own hidden recovery partition as well for the recovery functionality.
My questions are:
1) Will I have issues running Lion on a partition on a hard drive with multiple partitions that have different file systems?
2) If I install Lion into one of these partitions will it create it's recovery partition within the space of the partition it is being installed into?
3) I will be creating a clean install by downloading Lion using the App Store and then burning an installer DVD using instructions I found elsewhere and then using that to do the install on the new drive. Is that the best route to take?
All my current data I will have on a backup external hard drive and after I complete the Lion install on the new larger drive I will manually reinstall all my software and move my data back from my backup drive to the new drive one partition at a time except of course for OS partition. I keep all my real user data outside of that partition anyway.

I believe this article answers most of your questions.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4718
or possibly
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4649
You will most likely run into the error message that "Some features of Mac OS X Lion are not supported for the disk" if you have multiple partitions set up, especially if they were not set up using Bootcamp and/or have serveral different file systems.
You can confirm that the Recovery Partition will not be installed by checking Disk Utility for your current partition map scheme.
This is most definitely not the end of the world as it is quite easy to create an external Recovery disk.
1) No, you shouldn't have issues running Lion, but Recovery HD will not be created.
2) No, and in your case it doesn't sound like it will be installed on your internal drive at all.
3) Yes. If you begin with an empty partition, then install Lion that would be considered a clean install.
Hope that helps.
Autumn

My mac mini does not boot, after backing the enire system onto an external drive with Carbon Copy Clone

My Mac Mini does not boot, after backing the enire system onto an external drive with Carbon Copy Clone. I had switched the start-up disk back to the original of course. Now all I see is the Apple logo. What should I do? Thanks in advance.

Try disconnecting any external devices, especially hard drives
and try rebooting.
If that doesn't help, then :
If you are running Lion, boot to the Recovery HD and run a
Repair Disk on the OSX partition.
If Snow Leopard, boot to the installl DVD and run Repair Disk.
Also, you may want to bookmark this:
http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-57345273-263/troubleshooting-the-boot-proce ss-for-intel-macs/?tag=txt;title
for future reference. It is a pretty good explanation of the
Mac boot process and how to identify where problems may be.

If I create an external drive with Yosemite that I can boot from, will I also be able to boot from my internal drive still?

So I am still on Mountain Lion and I haven't upgraded because I have always been worried that Logic Pro, my Plug ins, and my Hardware wouldn't work right on the new OSX. I am now becoming interested in upgrading since Logic has a new update that I cant use.
My plan is to install Yosemite on an external drive that has thunderbolt connection so that I can boot from that and give everything a trial run. Is this something that actually works? If I do this, and things arent compatible on Yosemite, will I be able to boot from my internal and be back on Mountain Lion as I am now?
Thanks!

External drive must be partitioned and formatted for Mac OS Extended, Journaled.
Clone Yosemite, Mavericks, Lion/Mountain Lion using Restore Option of Disk Utility
Boot to the Recovery HD:
Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the menu screen appears. Alternatively, restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. Select the Recovery HD and click on the downward pointing arrow button.
     1. Select Disk Utility from the main menu then press the Continue
         button.
     2. Select the destination volume from the left side list.
     3. Click on the Restore tab in the DU main window.
     4. Select the destination volume from the left side list and drag it
         to the Destination entry field.
     5. Select the source volume from the left side list and drag it to
         the Source entry field.
     6. Double-check you got it right, then click on the Restore button.
Destination means the external drive. Source means the internal startup drive.

Trying to backup one of my iPhoto libraries I keep getting a error message that basically says that the file could not be backed up because there is another file on the external drive with the same name, etc. There is no other file.

While trying to copy one of my iPhoto libraries to an external hard drive I get the following error message "You can’t copy “iPhoto Library old” because it has the same name as another item on the destination volume, and that volume doesn’t distinguish between upper- and lowercase letters in filenames." There is no other file on the external drive with this name. I have asked this question before and was told that there are some duplicate photos (files) in my library and I needed to go to "show file contents" and look at certain files to find duplicates and delete the duplicates. I did all of this and the library will still not copy and always stops copying in the exact same place on each attempt. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

You've been deleting your actual Photos.
Don't change anything in the iPhoto Library Folder via the Finder or any other application. iPhoto depends on the structure as well as the contents of this folder. Moving things, renaming things, deleting them or otherwise making changes will prevent iPhoto from working and could even cause you to damage or lose your photos.
Best way forward now is to recover the surviving Originals from this library and start over from scratch.
Regards
TD

I have an old external drive with a firewall connection-How do I use this on my Mac with it's USB3 ports?

I have an old external drive with a firewall connection-How do I use this on my Mac with it's USB3 ports?

Does your Mac have ThunderBolt ports?
There are ThunderBolt to FireWire adapters.
As far as I know there are no FireWire to USB 3 adapters.
Allan

Using an external drive with shared files (iPhoto, iTunes), attached to a Time Capsule, can the contents of the external drive be backed-up to the internal Time Capsule drive? Perhaps a RAID1 mirror to a partition?

Using an external drive with shared files (iPhoto, iTunes), attached to a Time Capsule, can the contents of the external drive be backed-up to the internal Time Capsule drive? Perhaps a RAID1 mirror to a partitioned Time Capsule? I understand that the Time Machine (software) cannot backup a networked drive (the external) and that Time Capsule (the router/wireless hard drive) does not have its own backup software... so it won't backup the connected drive. What I would like is an alternate solution for having an automated backup of a networked drive. A 2TB Time Capsule has more than enough space for Time Machine backups of my family of Macbooks, so I had hoped to mirror a 500GB external drive (with shared media files) to a portion of the Time Capsule internal hard drive. I assume this would require a partition of the Time Capsule drive. If not, would the sparse file from the various computers being backed up need to be copied to the external drive as part of the RAID1 setup? This seems like overkill for the Time Machine backup, but it would cover the media files.

The complexity with this idea is the software has to run from a Mac computer on your network.. so you need a Mac turned on, probably most of the day.
It isn't possible to partition the TC although you can create a image area.
The software would have to copy the material, that means all files to be copied, go from USB drive, back to the Mac, then back to the TC, and written to the drive. In other words you have just added Network congestion, although a proper incremental backup type software will not actually use a lot of capacity.
Finally it will be slow.. network drives are slower than internal drives. Well USB connected drive is much slower than the same drive connected directly to the computer.. and if the drive is connected directly to a computer it can be shared with the network.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4577/airport-extreme-5th-gen-and-time-capsule-4th- gen-review-faster-wifi-/4
Read carefully the speed of the USB drive plugged into the TC.

Re: Leone's post May 2014 about how to best use an external drive with Aperture

I am trying to find Leone who had a great post May 2014 to Diane. I posted tho same message as a 'Reply' to the Leone/Diane posts but then was worried it would not show up since that was some time ago so I decided I should post it as new. Apologies if it comes through twice. I am having trouble as indicated below:
I found this response to the question about Aperture and external hard drives from last May. I bought a WD My Book 4TB and need to back up photos I have in Aperture (many!) to free up space. I am a photographer and need to be able to plug the external drive in as needed, pull a photo out from the WD and back into Aperture to work on it if needed.
I read your directions to Diane and have the external drive formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled). I read the two ways you suggest to move part or all of my library to an external drive and still be able to use it in Aperture with all the metadata saved, as I need to continue to work with the images. I am not completely clear about the advantage of the 'referenced' method but decided to go with the Split Library because it sounded like the Referenced method would still keep originals (and take space) in Aperture. I'm not sure about this, but that was what I chose.
I have backed up my computer, formatted the drive then went to Aperture to begin. I do the 'Export' and it shows the external drive it will go to but when I click 'OK', it says "EXPORT LIBRARY FAILED - Library could not be create because the file system of the destination volume is not supported." I doubled checked to be sure the drive was Journaled which it was. I did call WD and talk to them but they told me this was outside their area.
Also, in Aperture, I have my photos in Projects by yymmdd. Is it possible to transfer Projects into the ext. drive without having to break them out of the Projects?
Any direction anyone might give would be greatly appreciated, Sandy

Hi Sandy,
I suggest taking a week or two to get to know Aperture better before proceeding. Aperture can do many things, and can do what you want. It's important to be specific about what you want, however. From what you've said, it appears that you don't yet know.
bybeeler wrote:
[1] I found this response to the question about Aperture and external hard drives from last May. I bought a WD My Book 4TB and need to back up photos I have in Aperture (many!) to free up space.
[2] I am a photographer and need to be able to plug the external drive in as needed, pull a photo out from the WD and back into Aperture to work on it if needed.
[1] A back-up is a copy of digital files stores on a separate device. A back-up is recommended because drives fail, and humans make mistakes. A back-up is not used to free up storage space.
[2] Aperture can be set up in many equally-usable ways. The program files reside (almost always) on your system drive. The data files can be anywhere you want them, as long as they are on locally-mounted drive(s). The main data file is your Library. The best place for it is on the drive that has the fastest throughput to your logic board. This is, in nearly 100% of machines, the system drive. But Aperture functions well with Libraries of secondary drives — internal or external — with sufficient throughput. USB-3 and Thunderbolt I (& II) provide sufficient throughput for using an Aperture Library on a secondary drive.
Nearly all photographers will fill whatever storage space is available (making data is what photographers do). The question is: what do you do when your Library no longer fits on your system drive? (And remember, you should leave at least 10% (I recommend 20% for heavy users of Aperture) of your system drive free.) The answer depends, primarily, on whether your computer is portable or fixed in location.
If fixed, just buy a more-than-large-enough secondary drive of USB-3 or faster throughput, mount it permanently, and move (using Finder) your Library to it.
If your computer is portable (and you can't increase the on-board storage), you have to select the best from several confusing alternatives:
• Put your Library on an external drive with throughput at least as fast as USB-3
— Pros: Easy to maintain and back-up.
— Cons: Must have drive with you in order to use your Library.
• Leave your Library on your system drive, but relocate your Images' Originals to an external drive.
— Pros: You can work on your Library without having the external drive available.
— Cons: You can't export (except Previews), Print, or make adjustments until your external drive is mounted. Significantly more difficult to administer, especially importing and backing-up.
• Leave your Library and and _some_ of your Images' Originals on your system drive, and relocate most of your Image's Originals to an external drive.
— Pros: You can do any work on those Images whose Originals are stored in the Library regardless of where the external drive is.
— Cons: Yet another level more difficult to administer.
If you are comfortable with the administrative overhead, the third set-up will be the most rewarding. Keep all _current_ Images Originals inside your Library, and routinely relocate the Originals of Images no longer current to the external drive.
In no case is it recommended that you at any time remove from your Library an Image (not the Original — the Image in Aperture) that you expect to ever use again.
HTH,
—Kirby.

Lion 10.7.4 on an external drive with 2 partitions

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