Questions about partitioning

Hey everyone,
I'm currently in the process of backing up my data, in order to completely redo my partitioning scheme. Right now I have the following scheme, ordered by their place in the disk:
/dev/sda5 -> 4 GB swap
/dev/sda7 -> 30 GB ext4 / for Linux 1
/dev/sda8 -> 30 GB ext4 / for Linux 2
/dev/sda6 -> the rest of the 500 GB disk, ext4 /home for both
I wanted to redo it to something like this:
/dev/sda5 -> 1 GB ext2, /boot
/dev/sda6 -> 4 GB swap
/dev/sda7 -> 200 GB ext4, to be mounted under /mnt/Files, and symlinked to ~/Documents, Music, etc.
/dev/sda8, sda9, sda10, etc. -> rest of the disk, ext4 / for various Linux and possibly BSD distros.
Is something like this correct and optimized? I see a lot of places recommending having a separate /boot partition, I'm going to give it a try. ext2 seems to be well regarded in this aspect, would I gain anything from making it ext4? Is 1 GB too large?
Regarding the order on the disk, should I have it like that, or maybe /boot, then /mnt/Files, then swap, then the OSs? What is a generally good order for this sort of stuff?
Cheers
EDIT: Forgot to mention: the layout posted above would all be on an extended partition, on /dev/sda1. Would I gain anything if I made any ot the partitions primary?
EDIT2: Also, should I look into LVM? Would it interest me?
Last edited by Blackened Justice (2012-02-14 01:03:51)

Hmm, I guess I planned on having a swap because it's customary, I thought it was pretty much standard I have 3 GB of RAM, and it does sometimes get a bit too filled up when I run certain VMs.
A question: Just how exactly would I have several distributions running from the same /boot? I have some knowledge of playing with grub's menu.lst, making it point to different kernels and such, but I've never tried to have different distros on the same /boot... Would I just rename the initramfs-linux.img, initramfs-linux-fallback.img and vmlinuz-linux to something different, and then adjust menu.lst accordingly? How about running different distros from the same kernel?

Similar Messages

Few questions about partitioning and formatting in Windows 8

Hello,
I'm very shortly after a Windows 8 reinstall and I want to make use of this moment to finally understand partitioning and formatting in Windows 8.
Before using Windows 8, I was an XP user for 5 years and I actually never bothered myself with formatting my main system partition, that's probably why my computer ended up working like a slime for the last years. Anyway, by now I have been using Windows 8 for a year.
Three weeks ago I faced a system-related problem with my laptop (IdeaPad Y580) which prevented it from peacefully shutting down. A good friend of mine (XP user for his entire life, and now Windows 7 newbie user) told me, that I should keep all my non-system stuff on separate partition and that I should do the main system partition format from time to time to keep my PC out of trouble. It is sure that he took his knowledge from using XP, and here's my first question - does this method apply to Windows 8?
I mean as far as I know, back then, in XP, partitioning was possible only during Windows installation, and now, in Windows 8 we have a Disk Management for this, which do not require running Windows installation to create new partitions.
I'm mentioning this due to the fact that originally (I mean by factory settings) my drive has only one visible partition - C: (1TB), so I would need to use the Disk Management to take some space from C: partition and allocate it to the new D: partition.
In case I do this whole partitioning operation and create a D: partition, is it sure that formatting my system-only C: partition won't have effects on my D: partition, and all the programms and data I have here will stay on their places and work after format? (I'm worried about this because I've seen in some partitioning guide a warning not to format the main partition after the partitioning operation, because it would erase totally all data - I'm not sure if I misunderstood something or is it a mistake? EDIT: here's the link for this guide, just jump to the "Final Thoughts" section to see what I'm taking about: http://www.technorms.com/8438/windows-8-create-hard-drive-partition ).
If this whole method of keeping your system running fine doesn't apply to Windows 8, I guess I'm okay with having only one C: partition.
By the way, it doesn't matter for me if I create new partition in terms of conflicts with preinstalled Lenovo OneKey Recovery, since I had to reinstall my Windows 8 recently from non-Lenovo CD, and either way my laptop is now totally clean, without Lenovo stuff (I found Lenovo Recovery CD for Y580 on the internet, but it had non-single-language Windows 8 in it, and I needed a single-laguage one in order to have my Product Key recognised, so I just used a pure Windows 8 SL installer)

I just found out that I can't even transfer my Users folder or Program Data to other drive than the one with the system, because it would prevent me from updating my system or even from actually booting to my system. So apparently my whole topic is for nothing... I guess I should live with only one drive, and whenever my system totally crashes again I should do the backups to my external HDD. It's sad though that Windows 8 is a total opposite to user-friendly OS, to say the least.

[SOLVED] A few questions about partitions

Hi,
I'm using Windows XP as my primary OS atm. Last year I installed Linux Mint and got it working nicely along with XP, but now I want to try Arch. I have two hard disks - a 320GB SATA2 one and a secondary 80GB IDE one. I've separated about 50GB of the largest for Mint, and I'd like to use these for Arch. Thing is, I'm not sure how I partitioned my HD (I think Mint automated most of it) and I'm scared that I'll screw up. I ran fdisk -l with the Arch CD as suggested by the Beginner's Guide, and here's more or less what I got:
Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 1 32059 257513886 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sdb2 32060 38913 55054755 5 Extended
/dev/sdb5 32060 38627 52757428+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdb6 38628 38913 2297263+ 82 Linux swap/solaris
A few questions:
-> I assume sdb1 is where Windows is, and sdb2, 5 and 6 are Mint's. Is that correct? Why are there no sdb3 and 4?
-> If I understand it correctly, hdX means a partition in an IDE disk, and sdX means one in a SATA disk. Is that right? If so, why don't I have an hda (which would be the 80GB HD) partition, and why do I have sdbs instead of sdas?
-> When installing Arch, should I delete Mint's partitions and make new ones, or use the ones it already created?
-> If I decide to start using Arch as my primary OS in the future, will it be possible to resize its home partition?
Thank you very much and sorry for my cluelessness.
Last edited by Caio (2009-07-05 20:26:29)

Caio wrote:
Hi,
I'm using Windows XP as my primary OS atm. Last year I installed Linux Mint and got it working nicely along with XP, but now I want to try Arch. I have two hard disks - a 320GB SATA2 one and a secondary 80GB IDE one. I've separated about 50GB of the largest for Mint, and I'd like to use these for Arch. Thing is, I'm not sure how I partitioned my HD (I think Mint automated most of it) and I'm scared that I'll screw up. I ran fdisk -l with the Arch CD as suggested by the Beginner's Guide, and here's more or less what I got:
Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 1 32059 257513886 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sdb2 32060 38913 55054755 5 Extended
/dev/sdb5 32060 38627 52757428+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdb6 38628 38913 2297263+ 82 Linux swap/solaris
A few questions:
Caio wrote:-> I assume sdb1 is where Windows is, and sdb2, 5 and 6 are Mint's. Is that correct? Why are there no sdb3 and 4?
My guess is because you made the second partion extended. normally 1,2,3,4 will be primary or one will be marked extended. It probably skipped 3 and 4 since you didn't create anymore primary partitions.
Caio wrote:-> If I understand it correctly, hdX means a partition in an IDE disk, and sdX means one in a SATA disk. Is that right? If so, why don't I have an hda (which would be the 80GB HD) partition, and why do I have sdbs instead of sdas?
With the new libata driver they all show up as sd?, so no this rule isn't correct.
Caio wrote:-> When installing Arch, should I delete Mint's partitions and make new ones, or use the ones it already created?
I would reformat the partitions, but if they are how you want them then you should just leave the partition table untouched. By reformat them I mean recreate the filesystem.
Caio wrote:
-> If I decide to start using Arch as my primary OS in the future, will it be possible to resize its home partition?
Thank you very much and sorry for my cluelessness.
It looks like you do not have a separate home partition. My guess is you have your windows partition, the extended, and then that is broken into one large partition for / and then swap at the end.
Edit: Oh I should have pointed out, normally arch creates a separate /home partition, if you want this you will have to restructure your extended partitions. This isn't necessary though, it's a preferance thing, there pros/cons to going either route.
Last edited by Zepp (2009-07-05 14:53:58)

[Solved]Question about partitioning

Hi!
I`ve installed Arch, but made a bit of mistake when partitioning my HDD. I`ve made 4 primary partitions: swap, /, /var and /home. Now i`ve got ~200Ggb of free space left on my HDD, but i can`t create a partition, since the primary partition limit is reached. So i thought of deleting the /var partition ( only 7Ggb ), creating the extended partition on those 200Ggb, and creating three partitions there: two for my own needs and a /var partition. My question is: will Arch recognize the /var partition on the extended one as his own? Or will i mess things up?
Thanks in advance.
Last edited by K0tuk (2009-05-03 16:38:25)

K0tuk wrote:
Hi!
I`ve installed Arch, but made a bit of mistake when partitioning my HDD. I`ve made 4 primary partitions: swap, /, /var and /home. Now i`ve got ~200Ggb of free space left on my HDD, but i can`t create a partition, since the primary partition limit is reached. So i thought of deleting the /var partition ( only 7Ggb ),
why don't you simply extend your home partition with gparted?
K0tuk wrote:creating the extended partition on those 200Ggb, and creating three partitions there: two for my own needs and a /var partition. My question is: will Arch recognize the /var partition on the extended one as his own?
sure, if you make an entry in /etc/fstab. afaik, there is no user noticeable difference between primary/extended partitions (the differences are only of technical nature, eg you cannot make a extended swap partition).
wikipedia knows it all: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_partitioning
vlad

A question about partition.

Dear All,
I am working with transparent partition recently. And I face a problem now.
There are three blocks in both source and target database, and I want to aggregate two of the source data to the target.
i.e.
SA----------->TA
SB+SC------>TB
void---------->TC
Is this possible? If not, is there any suggestion about the situation? Thanks!
Best Regards,
Martin

Hello Jennifer,
each partition will holds its own subset of data, there is no redundant / mirrored data.
Data is distributed via a hash algorithm

Qosmio X500/02 - Question about partition

Hello Forum,
I have a just purchased a Qosmio X500/02 notebook and have noticed on one of the HDD, a partition having the specs. of
NTFS (System) Pri. Act. and a size of 1.465 GB.
Is this partition created in order to use the built-in backup and restore utility?
Regards JohnBoy_Oz

Hi buddy,
Normally you have at least two partitions on your notebook. The first partition contains the Windows installation from Toshiba with all drivers and tools.
The second partition contains a folder called HDDrecovery. These files are necessary for HDD recovery option to restore factory settings on your notebook.
Usually the first partition is called WINDOWS and the second one Data.
Does the partition that you mean contain a folder called HDDrecovery or not?
As Jeka wrote, create the Toshiba recovery disk as fast as possible. It can restore factory settings all the time.

Questioning about Partitioning a new Internal Hard Drive

I just bought a new Internal Hard Drive, Western Digital Caviar, 500 GB. I am trying to Partition the Drive but, there is a pull down menu which I am not sure what to select.
On "Volume Scheme, I selected 1 Partition from the menu, BUT, what do I select on "Format"?
It gives me these options:
1. Mac OS Extended (journaled)
2. Mac OS Extended
3. Mac OS Extended (case sensitive, Journaled)
4. Mac OS Extended (case sensitive)
5. Mac OS Extended
Free-Space
I am not sure what to choose here, IF I have to chose anything. All I need is another HD where I will have music samples on it.
Any help would be appreciate it.

For normal purposes, use Mac OS Extended (journaled)

Question about the partition index

Hi, all, I have some questions about partitioned index.
And I get from oracle documents that oracle's partition index can be clarified as local partition index and global partition index.
And local partition index can be clarified as prefix local partition index and non-prefix local partition index. And I also the word "global prefix partition index".
But, I can not get what the exact meaning after I consulted many documents and notes from website.
Can anyone give me one example to cover these topic?
You help is very thankful!
Thanks and best regards!

Hi,
Local index search by partition.
Local Indexes: A local index is an index on a partitioned table which is partitioned in the exact same manner as the underlying partitioned table. Each partition of a local index corresponds to one and only one partition of the underlying table.
Global Partitioned Indexes: A global partitioned index is an index on a partitioned or non-partitioned table which is partitioned using a different partitioning-key from the table. Global-partitioned indexes can only be partitioned using range partitioning. For example, a table could be range-partitioned by month and have twelve partitions, while an index on that table could be range-partitioned using a different partitioning key and have a different number of partitions.
Global Non-Partitioned Indexes: A global non-partitioned index is essentially identical to an index on a non-partitioned table. The index structure is not partitioned.
Maybe this links help you:
http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/oracle9i/datasheets/partitioning.html
http://asktom.oracle.com/pls/ask/f?p=4950:8:12026637104196321871::NO::F4950_P8_DISPLAYID,F4950_P8_CRITERIA:678824574412
http://asktom.oracle.com/pls/ask/f?p=4950:8:::::F4950_P8_DISPLAYID:1612281449571
Cheers

Re: Questions about Plan structure

Reply-To: "Duncan Kinnear" <[email protected]>
Q. if you have an Employee class with related EmployeeSubordinate and
EmployeeSalaryHistory classes, should these all be in the same plan?
A It is better to have them in the same plan.It depends on the design
you have
Q Why should the Managers be separated from their business classes?
A Managers are usually service objects which might require different
resources.
These managers when deployed might be required by several other
applications.
Seperating them as a different plan will help in just using one
installed partition to be
Used by different applications (refer about Reference Partition)
Q If you have the Database managers separate, what scope does each DB
manager cover?
A It is better to have the DB managers in user scope.
It depends on the numbers of users, u have for the system.
Since u are talking about 100 tables. It's a huge system.
It also depends on the user licenses u have for the backend.
Take care that u use proper load balancing of DB Managers for the
system.
Krishna CVSR
GoldStone Softech Inc
>
Hi there,
We are in the middle of designing the structure of a new system.
I have read/heard that it is best to break down the plans into the
following categories:
Business Classes
Managers/Services
Clients
I have a few questions about this structure:
Should related business classes be grouped together in Plans? E.g. if
you have an Employee class with related EmployeeSubordinate and
EmployeeSalaryHistory classes, should these all be in the same plan?
Why should the Managers be separated from their business classes?
E.g. if there is an EmployeeMgr service which deals with anything to do
with the Employee business class, why separate them in different
plans? If you need the manager to access the class, you will always
need both.
Some of the Forte documentation talks about "Policy" managers and
"Database" managers. How do the functions of these managers differ
for a simple CRUD (Create Read Update Delete) class?
If you have the Database managers separate, what scope does each
DB manager cover? I.e. do you have one for the entire database (over
100 tables in our case), or do you break it down by sub-system?
Thanks in advance for any answers.
Cheers,
Duncan Kinnear,
McCarthy and Associates, Email: [email protected]
PO Box 764, McLean Towers, Phone: +64 6 834 3360
Shakespeare Road, Napier, New Zealand. Fax: +64 6 834 3369
Providing Integrated Software to the Meat Processing Industry for over 10 years
To unsubscribe, email '[email protected]' with
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Reply-To: "Duncan Kinnear" <[email protected]>
Q. if you have an Employee class with related EmployeeSubordinate and
EmployeeSalaryHistory classes, should these all be in the same plan?
A It is better to have them in the same plan.It depends on the design
you have
Q Why should the Managers be separated from their business classes?
A Managers are usually service objects which might require different
resources.
These managers when deployed might be required by several other
applications.
Seperating them as a different plan will help in just using one
installed partition to be
Used by different applications (refer about Reference Partition)
Q If you have the Database managers separate, what scope does each DB
manager cover?
A It is better to have the DB managers in user scope.
It depends on the numbers of users, u have for the system.
Since u are talking about 100 tables. It's a huge system.
It also depends on the user licenses u have for the backend.
Take care that u use proper load balancing of DB Managers for the
system.
Krishna CVSR
GoldStone Softech Inc
>
Hi there,
We are in the middle of designing the structure of a new system.
I have read/heard that it is best to break down the plans into the
following categories:
Business Classes
Managers/Services
Clients
I have a few questions about this structure:
Should related business classes be grouped together in Plans? E.g. if
you have an Employee class with related EmployeeSubordinate and
EmployeeSalaryHistory classes, should these all be in the same plan?
Why should the Managers be separated from their business classes?
E.g. if there is an EmployeeMgr service which deals with anything to do
with the Employee business class, why separate them in different
plans? If you need the manager to access the class, you will always
need both.
Some of the Forte documentation talks about "Policy" managers and
"Database" managers. How do the functions of these managers differ
for a simple CRUD (Create Read Update Delete) class?
If you have the Database managers separate, what scope does each
DB manager cover? I.e. do you have one for the entire database (over
100 tables in our case), or do you break it down by sub-system?
Thanks in advance for any answers.
Cheers,
Duncan Kinnear,
McCarthy and Associates, Email: [email protected]
PO Box 764, McLean Towers, Phone: +64 6 834 3360
Shakespeare Road, Napier, New Zealand. Fax: +64 6 834 3369
Providing Integrated Software to the Meat Processing Industry for over 10 years
To unsubscribe, email '[email protected]' with
'unsubscribe forte-users' as the body of the message.
Searchable thread archive <URL:http://pinehurst.sageit.com/listarchive/>
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
To unsubscribe, email '[email protected]' with
'unsubscribe forte-users' as the body of the message.
Searchable thread archive <URL:http://pinehurst.sageit.com/listarchive/>

A few questions about Boot Camp: installation, performance, which Win OS?

Hello.
I am planning on getting a windows OS. My main motives for this are because I would like to get some PC only games (I've been eyeing that Fallout 3 Game of the Year Edition that is soon to come out) and because there is a good chance that I will need some PC only programs for my college work. I just had a few questions before I did anything. Note: I am running 10.5.8 now but getting 10.6 soon.
1. According to wikipedia: "Its functionality relies on BIOS emulation through EFI and a partition table information synchronization mechanism between GPT and MBR combined". The only word I understood of that sentence was "emulation." I know that emulation software significantly reduces performance. Is this true for boot camp? (say i were to get the exact same game for both mac and windows and set them to the exact same performance settings, when playing on windows, would there be more lag than on OS X?)
2. Which Windows OS should I get? Since I am just going to be using Boot Camp to run games and a few other programs, would XP be the best to get to optimize the application's performance (as opposed to Win 7)?
3. How complex is installation? I am a decent Mac techie, but this is my first time with boot camp, and I am a Windows noobie.
4. There seems to be a lot of talk about partitions. What exactly is a partition? I have some theories, but want to know for sure.
Message was edited by: Tomatoes&RadioWires

Hi,
check out the following link, excellent advice and performance tests on gaming.
cheers,
Dave
http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.25/25.04/VMBenchmarks/index.html

A few questions about my MacBook Pro?

Hey guys, I have a few questions about Virtual Machines and a few other random questions.
1. Which one is the most "complete" in its features when compared to a plain install of Win. 7?
2. Which VM should I purchase?
I have a 15" late 2012 MacBook Pro with a 2.6 ghz intel i7, 16gb ram and a 256gb SSD. (I was planning on running it off of an external hard drive— if that is possible)
3. I have 206.12 GB of 255.2 GB free— should I just use boot camp instead?
4. If I use Boot Camp, do I have to delete the data that's on my Mac currently to install Win. 7 or can I partition my current drive and keep my data?
5. What is the "other" data that's taking up 25.51 GB of space on my SSD? (I have the same problem on my iPhone, but that's a different problem.)
Thank you very much.

You posted your Boot Camp questions in the MacBook Pro forum. Try asking in the Boot Camp forum where the Boot Camp gurus hang out. https://discussions.apple.com/community/windows_software/boot_camp

Question about autodiscover in case of multiple bound namespace

Hi Experts,
I have a question about the autodiscover behaviour. Let's assume we have the below infrastructure:
SiteA :
MBX-Server-SiteA : Member of a DAG
CAS-Server-SiteA : outlook anywhere url = siteA.domain.com
SiteB :
MBX-Server-SiteB : Member of a DAG
CAS-Server-SiteB-1 : outlook anywhere url = siteB-1.domain.com
CAS-Server-SiteB-2: outlook anywhere url = siteB-2.domain.com
We have DB-1 and DB-2 that have copies in both MBX servers.
My question is how does exchange select the access URLs to return in the autodiscover process? I know that it depends on where the mailbox is hosted but can't find details about the process in the technet articles.
Thanks.

There's quite a few details that are involved in the Autodiscover process. First of all - probably the most important thing is that there are 2 stages to the whole process.
In the first stage, the client is simply concerned with getting the address of a CAS server that will help it further. We'll keep things simple and assume your scenario where the client is located inside the network and is domain-joined. The details of the
LDAP query are detailed in
this link. (At the time I was investigating this I've actually went ahead and ran the queries using the ldp.exe client against the Configuration partition of the respective AD domain - it's worth seeing the actual responses.) An interesting trick here is
the 'keywords' attribute that's stamped on those SCP entries. The reason behind it is that you don't want a client located in a site to go half across the globe in order to connect to a CAS server, when there's one available in its own site. One simple way
to get the 'keywords' attribute stamped is through the Set-ClientAccessServer cmdlet, using the -AutodiscoverSiteScope parameter. In your example, you'd probably want to run it against the CAS server in Site A and specify the name of the corresponding AD site
('SiteA') and correspondingly against the 2 CAS servers in Site B (using 'SiteB'). Once the client has got the response to his query, it will attempt to select one server that's handling the site he's in (essentially it will filter the results based on 'keywords'
-contains <client-site>). Now that we got our endpoint we can go to stage 2.
In stage 2, the client will actually use EWS in order to query the Autodiscover service itself running on our target server. There are 2 possible interfaces of accessing the Autodiscover service: POX (Plain Old XML) and SOAP. POX will be targeting the ../Autodiscover.xml
URLS, while the SOAP one will be using ../Autodiscover.svc URLs. Details about this including some hardcoded parts are
here. What happens next is detailed in point 3, section 2.1 The Autodiscover Process
here. This last link is the key to the whole process:
"It provides a list of CAS that has AutodiscoverSiteScope information set for the
Associated AD site of the Database where the client Mailbox is located."
In other words, the CAS is smart enough to return the URLs belonging to a CAS server in the AD site where the client's mailbox' database is active.
My advice is to test this on your scenario. Tests can be done here first-hand: the Outlook's tray icon Test E-Mail AutoConfiguration can be used or alternatively - if you want to see the details in the communication - SoapUI
for the SOAP access method, for POX there's an extension called 'Postman for Chrome' that can be used. I've used all these in my tests back when I was fighting conflicting results from the articles around the web about Autodiscover.
That's a long way of saying we get the AutoD URL of a CAS server closest to the workstation, which then provides the configuration to use which are the the URLs closest to the mailbox :)
By all means look at the SOAP response, but Outlook will only use POX. Lync does SOAP along with other 3rd party apps.
Cheers,
Rhoderick
Microsoft Senior Exchange PFE
Blog:
http://blogs.technet.com/rmilne
Twitter:   LinkedIn:
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Note: Posts are provided “AS IS” without warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, including but not limited to the implied warranties of merchantability and/or fitness for a particular purpose.

Questions about Macbook

I am about to go into my first year of college this July, and I've been looking for a laptop. I've used iMacs before a little bit, but I have a few questions about the Macbook Pro and Mac OS X 10.5. So if someone can help me that would be great.
First of all: How is the Macbook Pro overall as a laptop? Is it a pretty good one?
Secondly: How good is the back-up utility? (Time Machine) Is it pretty good? How big of an external hard drive would I need to back up everything?
Third question: How is the program Boot Camp? I'm planning on putting Windows XP Pro on the Mac using Boot Camp. How is compatibility? Also I've heard that if you make the partition for Windows less than 32 GB, the partitions would be able to "see" each other... does that mean Mac OS X can read FAT 32 drives? Would I be able to transfer files between the two OSs with that setup?
and lastly: Would Mac OS X be able to read my flash drive?
Thanks in advance everyone

batwing20 wrote:
First of all: How is the Macbook Pro overall as a laptop? Is it a pretty good one?
I find it phenomenal, the best laptop I've used. OS X is a versatile and stable OS, and the hardware hasn't given me any trouble.
Secondly: How good is the back-up utility? (Time Machine) Is it pretty good? How big of an external hard drive would I need to back up everything?
It works great for me. You can't be nit-picky, so if you want a backup program with lots of settings there are plenty of options, but for those of us who just want something to fall back on when the HD goes kaput or we delete a file on accident, its perfect.
Third question: How is the program Boot Camp? I'm planning on putting Windows XP Pro on the Mac using Boot Camp. How is compatibility? Also I've heard that if you make the partition for Windows less than 32 GB, the partitions would be able to "see" each other... does that mean Mac OS X can read FAT 32 drives? Would I be able to transfer files between the two OSs with that setup?
I haven't used it enough to answer the file sharing questions, but in my limited use it's been excellent, and many friends rave.
It's worth noting that when PC World was testing the fastest Windows Vista laptops, #1 was the MBP running Vista on BootCamp.
and lastly: Would Mac OS X be able to read my flash drive?
Yes. USB drives work great. The only thing, when you delete a file off a flash drive with default formatting, you'll only send it to a hidden "trashes" file. To permanently delete it off the stick, you'll need to push commandshiftdelete.
Hope that helps!

Here's a very basic question about 2 TB external drives and Time Machine.

Here's a very basic question about 2 TB external drives and Time Machine.
Ihave a Mac Pro with a .75 TB and 1 TB drive. It also has a 1 TB 2ndinternal drive. My current external drive is too small so I'll begetting a 1.5 TB or 2 TB drive.
Obviouslythe new larger 2 TB drive will backup everything on the Mac Prointernal drive with Time Machine. But there will be 1 TB of space leftover going to waste.
ShouldI partition the external drive so that the TM portion will be 1 TB andthe use the remaining extra partition for additional file backups withCarbon Copy?
Thanks for any insights.
I tried searching around on the new Apple discussion forum, but I find it much harder to use than the old forum I used to use.

The problem with terabyte drives is that that a 3 TB is about as big as you can get without going into RAID territory. Ideally, a Time Machine drive should be 3 times as large as all the drives you are backing up. So, if you have 2.75 TB of internal storage, you should have 8 TB of Time Machine space.
Of course, that is "should". If your TB drives are mostly empty, then you can get away with something 3 times the size of your used disk space. Just remember that you are pushing it. Linc is right about Time Machine needing space to work.
It is unlikely that you have regular churn on 2.75 TB of disk. I suggest identifying which drives and folders have the most activity and excluding those drives and directories that don't change much. It would be better to archive the data that doesn't change often and keep it out of Time Machine. Then you may be able to get away with a 2 TB Time Machine drive.

Question about 2 TB external drives and Time Machine.

Here's a very basic question about 2 TB external drives and Time Machine.
I have a Mac Pro with a .75 TB and 1 TB drive. It also has a 1 TB 2nd internal drive. My current external drive is too small so I'll be getting a 1.5 TB or 2 TB drive.
Obviously the new larger 2 TB drive will backup everything on the Mac Pro internal drive with Time Machine. But there will be 1 TB of space left over going to waste.
Should I partition the external drive so that the TM portion will be 1 TB and the use the remaining extra partition for additional file backups with Carbon Copy?
Thanks for any insights.
I tried searching around on the new Apple discussion forum, but I find it much harder to use than the old forum I used to use.

John,
I'm not sure why you posted in the iMac forum so I'm going to attempt to get you to the correct spot. I would recommend reposting in the Time Machine Forum, this is part of the OS X forums (Leopard or Snow Leopard) because you are using Snow Leopard (your profile indicates you are) please click Apple Support Communities and type Snow Leopard. Then you can narrow the search down by clicking Refine this List.
Roger

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