Re-Setting Pram - Defragmenting Hard Drive

I was finally able to get the Flashing Question Mark removed and re-install my OS 9.1 install CD by using Norton Uitlities, my question is... should a person re-set the PRAM every once and awhile to (De-Fragment the Harddrive if thats what resetting the PRAM does ? ) to keep the computer operating soomthly, or does a person only do that in dire needs ? Thanks Eric

Hi, Eric -
...where did you learn all that ?
Partly from doing things wrong and having to figure out how to fix them; partly from books (the Missing Manual series from Pogue Press and the Dummies series are quite good); and in recent years mostly from hanging around in these Discussions forums.
I agree with Allan - although it appears that the Speed Disk and Unerase utilities that come with Norton are reasonably safe to use, Norton Disk Doctor has been identified too many times in these forums as causing more harm than cure; it seems to have a bad habit of fixing things that aren't broken.
In general, and specifically with NDD, it is wise to use a disk utility only when the OS on its CD is of equal or greater version than the newest OS on the hard drive.
Partitioning a hard drive, in effect, creates two or more smaller hard drives (volumes) out of one larger one. For most purposes the Mac will treat each volume (volume = an unpartitioned drive, or a partition of a partitioned one) as if it were a separate drive. This can be used to advantage, provided the drive is large enough.
For example, many folk have partitioned their hard drive in order to have OS 9 and OSX on separate volumes. This can make maintenance, repair, and (if needed) reinstallation of each OS easier. On older machines doing so can also speed the machine up a bit, since the running OS would not need to search as large a space in order to find a file it needs.
Partitioning can also be useful for temporary files, particularly large ones which need to not be fragmented - such as when doing video, audio, or even some graphics work. A partition dedicated for such use is easily defragmented - just erase it using Finder's Erase Disk function.
If you're interested in partitioning a drive -
• Plan ahead. Partitioning a drive will erase everything on it, so be sure you have backed up everything you do not want to lose before doing so. It helps to decide in advance what your partitioning scheme will be - how many partitions, and what size each will be. Part of that process is taking into account that the first partition (the one at the top of the list in the partitioning window) will be the fastest; the last one will be the slowest. The primary OS (or OS's) should be on the first partition, probably with applications.
• Use OS 9's Drive Setup to do it (from an OS 9.1 or later version Install CD), or even OSX's Disk Utility, rather than Norton or another 3rd-party utility. Instructions for using Drive Setup to partition a drive are included in this article -
Using Drive Setup
• Partitioning does not replace the need for effective backups. If the drive itself dies, so do all partitions on it.

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I have a new MAcBook Air and my photos don't fit on the internal hard drive. I want to store my photos on an external hard drive which I will connect to my Air when using Iphoto. How do I set an external hard drive as the default drive?

I have a new MAcBook Air and my photos don't fit on the internal hard drive. I want to store my photos on an external hard drive which I will connect to my Air when using Iphoto. How do I set an external hard drive as the default drive in Iphoto?

Make sure the drive is formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
1. Quit iPhoto
2. Copy the iPhoto Library from your Pictures Folder to the External Disk.
3. Hold down the option (or alt) key while launching iPhoto. From the resulting menu select 'Choose Library' and navigate to the new location. From that point on this will be the default location of your library.
4. Test the library and when you're sure all is well, trash the one on your internal HD to free up space.
Regards
TD

How to set up multiple hard drives for video editing?

I have recently purchase a new custom built PC for video editing with Premiere.
I have 3 seperate HDD's as I read on one of the forums that I should set up the hard drives as follows:
one for OS/programs
one for media
one for pagefile/scratch/rendors (these are new terms for me and I am not exactly sure what they mean)
If anybody can help walk me through the steps to set up/program my HDDs properly for editing video for adobe CS5, it would be greatly appreciated.
I do not know where to begin to set this up as recommended.
Thanks in advance.

Todd_Kopriva wrote:
I go through this in this video:
http://www.video2brain.com/en/videos-5353.htm
This video helped a lot. I have configured through my adobe software accordingly. Another user also suggested that I configure redirecting of my swap files through windows. I was unable to figure out how to do that.
Is that necessary?
Thanks.
Your video definately helped.

I inadvertently set my external hard drive as default for Iphoto.

I inadvertently set my external hard drive as the default for iPhoto. Can I copy all the albums over to the IMac IPhoto files? If so How?

No - albums are virtual things that exist only in the iPhoto database - another view of photos in your library like events, photos, places, etc
you are going to have to explain yourself - things like the versions of iPhoto and the OS, do you have two iPhoto libraries one on each drive or only one - exactlhy what you want to do and to accomplish
and how you "inadvdertently" did this
LN

Defrag hard drive

best way to defrag hard drive...?

Not needed, this ain't an MBR/NTFS Windoze volume.
So long as you don't fill it up to the brim, the OS takes care of defragmenting on the fly. Should always leave at least 10-15% of the volume empty.

U410 ultrabook: Can I defrag hard drive with SSD cache?

Hi,
I would like to know if I can defrag my hard drive with 24G SSD cache. I heard that it would be bad to defrag the SSD part so I would like to defrag the regular hard drive portion only (1TB). I right clicked the drive but I see four drives and can't tell which one I should defrag. It looks like the first c drive is the one, but I am not sure. Any comments would be helpful. Thanks.

You are right that by default, drives are set to be defragged automatically. But you can also do it manually and when the date of the task is not yet due.
Re ssd, are there permanent files in that drive? By permanent, I mean data, programs, etc.. Not the temporary files used by runned programs and the system using the caching process.

Why does the put display to sleep setting put the hard drive to sleep

In the energy options (preferences) for power adapter, I have set the display to sleep after 1 minute but the hard drive is set to never. I do this when I am downloading but don't need to use the macbook. However, the macbook seems to go to sleep anyway - any idea why? Any new settings?
I've maintained these settings on my Power Book G4 and it puts the display to sleep but keeps the Power Book on while downloading.
Thanks
Kru
Macbook Mac OS X (10.4.9)
Macbook Mac OS X (10.4.9)

May be try magic
Resetting your Mac's PRAM and NVRAM
and
Resetting MacBook and System Management Controller (SMC)

Creating a mirrored raid set with a hard drive that already has data on it.

I have a hard drive that I keep my photos on, and want to create a mirrored raid set that includes this drive, with its data, and another drive. How can I do this without erasing the drive with my photos on them? I am running 10.7.5 if that matters.
Thanks for any help.

Creating a Mirrored RAID reformats the drive and loads a substantial RAID driver and some tables onto it. When completed, the drive is inherently a member of a RAID set, and will continue to be so even if moved to another Mac.
because of this, you cannot create a RAID directly on a standard drive that contains data already in any reasonable, risk-free way.
To amplify what The Hatter has said above, Mirrored RAID is not Backup. Mirrored RAID only increases mean time to repair to keep a drive failure from becoming a Data Disaster. You still need a Backup. Mirrored RAID does not protect you from deletions from user error, crazy software, or "just because".
I run a mirrored RAID in my Home Server, which contains all the Users files for everyone in the Household. And I also recognize (after being burned by it) that Mirrored RAID is helpful, but not a sufficient Backup by itself. I back up the Users Drive automatically to an External drive using Time Machine. [So what I am advising is not just theoretical, I am living what I am advising.]
With WD Black 1TB and other very good drives in the under US$100 range, there is really no reason NOT to invest in several drives for such an undertaking.

Need help setting up external hard drive for FCE project

Hi folks,
Basically I am looking at making a 20-30 minute video this summer of my motocross adventures and what not and have equipped myself with an iMac (2.93 GHZ Core2Duo 640GB 4GB) and of course, FCE. I have tried smaller projects before (ranging in length between 20 seconds to upwards of a few minutes) but have noticed an overall decline in computer speed which I am under the impression is being caused by the 10s of GBs of video project files and what not that seem to be scrawled away within my computer. Before I made any videos, my computer was sitting around 560 GBs of free space. Since making maybe 3-4 videos (50/50 iMovie and FCE) its down below 400GBs. I'm not sure whether it's the raw video files or the projects themselves that are so large, but it's slightly frustrating. Is there any sort of software (either third party or apple) that can look at your hard drive and tell you exactly where all the biggest files are? I'll post this question in the iMac forum as I realize this is for FCE, but I thought if anyone knew of one it would be extremely helpful.
Anyways, I have a SimpleDrive 320GB external HD that I plan to use as my external for making this project within FCE and would like some help in terms of how to set it up with FCE, what are the best settings etc. It is currently formatted with Windows, so I will also need help in setting it up for a Mac. I do have about 120GBs used on it already and was also wondering if I could keep this when re-formatting, but I'm pretty sure I already know the answer to that.
Sorry for the long-winded post; any information on this or something related would be fantastic. Thanks.

Yes, you can use your external HD with FCE ... provided it is formatted as +Mac OS Extended+ and is connected via FireWire.
You will need to back up any data that is on the drive that you want to keep. Before reformatting it. Formatting erases everything that is on the drive.
Use Disk Utility (located in your +Applications > Utilities+ folder) to format the drive.
After formatting the drive, go into +FCE > System Settings+ and change your FCE scratch disk location to the external drive.

Time Machine: setting-up external hard drive question

I purchased the Lacie 2TB External Hard Drive from Apple and in the set-up process it said to free up all 2 TB storage space if I intend to use it only for my MAC (which I do), so that's what I did. However, when I was doing that, the set-up screen kept giving me these warning signs if I did all MAC like the screen told me to do it would erase data on the disk...I did all MAC anyways so not sure what got erased since nothing I thought is supposed to be on there...don't these come clean with 2TB available? I just want to make sure I did this right!

KrystelleLynne wrote:
I have been doing back-ups on with it using time machine. I did not, however, do the check in disk utility. Since there are back-ups on the hard drive, should I still erase?
Not now no. All is ok then.
If Time machine HAS been backing up to it, its fine, it couldnt use it otherwise.
However now that youve got A (single) backup, dont make the huge mistake everyone else does, backup your data on yet another HD and update it and store it somewhere safe
second HD doesnt have to use time machine, just drag and drop your valuable data.
Hard drives are cheap as dirt, buy another one at minimum if you cherish your priceless data.
https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-6031
The Tragedy that will be, the tragedy that never should be
Always presume correctly that your data is priceless and takes a very long time to create and often is irreplaceable. Always presume accurately that hard drives are extremely cheap, and you have no excuse not to have multiple redundant copies of your data copied on hard drives and squirreled away several places, lockboxes, safes, fireboxes, offsite and otherwise.
Hard drives aren't prone to failure…hard drives are guaranteed to fail (the very same is true of SSD). Hard drives dont die when aged, hard drives die at any age, and peak in death when young and slowly increase in risk as they age.
Never practice at any time for any reason the false premise and unreal sense of security in thinking your data is safe on any single external hard drive. This is never the case and has proven to be the single most common horrible tragedy of data loss that exists.
Many 100s of millions of hours of lost work and data are lost each year due to this single common false security. This is an unnatural disaster that can avoid by making all data redundant and then redundant again. If you let a $60 additional redundant hard drive and 3 hours of copying stand between you and years of work, then you've made a fundamental mistake countless 1000s of people each year have come to regret.
Many countless people think they're safe and doing well having a single external backup of their vital data they worked months, years, and sometimes decades on. Nothing could be further from the truth. Never let yourself be in situation of having a single external copy of your precious data.

How to set up external hard drive and FCE 4

I am going to buy an external hard drive (firewire 400) and FCE4 but I am not sure how to set everything up.
Where should I load the software, capture to, and save projects?

FCE should always live on your system drive. Use the external as your Scratch Disk. You will select this in System Settings in FCE. I create a folder on the external for my projects and point FCE to it.
Keep your project files on your system drive as well as your autsave vault if you use that. You can put your other files, such as wavefrom caches on the external, though I leave them on my system drive.
Do not partition the drive. Format as OS Extended

Help with setting up External hard Drive?

Hi,
I bought an 80GB External hard Drive and have just plugged it into my MacBook Pro. It lights up and I can hear the Hard Drive running in it's case, but I cannot move any files on my desktop into the External hard Drive icon. A message keeps coming up that the External HD cannot be modified. I've tried going to Disk utility to repair the Hard Drive but no options are highlighted when I select the 'New Volume' External Hard Drive.
Is there a way to set this up on my MacBook Pro?
Thanks in Advance.

Got it sorted, i went into Disk Utility again and went to erase. I erased the disk using the OS Extended (Journaled) option and it worked.

HELP - problems setting up External Hard Drive to Time machine

Hi
I set up Time Machine about a month ago. I had an additional 250GB USB External Hard Drive connected but it was not included in the back up. I think that at the time I had been told that I could add the files from the 250GB external to the back-up Time Machine disk later.
Also, before I set up Time Machine on the new 1TB USB drive, I partitioned the drive, and I think as I was deciding how to partition it, I used the Erase utility to reset the drive. I don't know if that is relevant.
Time Machine has been working fine with my internal drive - well I haven't needed to restore anything with it, so I don't really know.
However, I have tried to add the 250GB drive to Time Machine, and in Preferences->Options, the 250GB drive is greyed out in the 'Do no back up' list. And the - (minus) box is also greyed out so nothing happens when clicking on it.
I tried to sort this out a couple of weeks ago, and someone helpful on the forum advised me:
"to move the file /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist to the desktop. then go to system preferences->Time machine and set up time machine again. the exclusion list will be empty and you can add what you want to it. "
I tried this a number of times and each time I struggled to set it up again. When moving the .plist file I was always asked whether to keep or replace. I tried both, sometimes the file would come back into the folder, sometimes not.
The 250 GB drive was still on the list of 'Do Not Back Up the following drives". After one occasion recently on my attempts, the system did not recognize time machine.
I'm really stuck here - both my drives are ridiculously low in space.
Please help,
Thanks
Steve

What is it you are trying to do? Do you want to change the backup drive from the one you have been using to another drive? That's all you can do. If you have a drive set up as the TM backup drive, you cannot designate another drive as the backup drive unless you disable the existing backup drive. TM cannot backup to more than one drive at a time, and TM cannot span backups across multiple drives.
To move any device out of the Exclude list simply select it then click on the [-] button to remove it from the list.
To prepare a new drive as the backup drive you must partition the drive GUID or APM depending upon whether your computer is Intel or PPC, respectively, and the formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) See the following:
Extended Hard Drive Preparation
1. Open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder. If you need to reformat your startup volume, then you must boot from your OS X Installer Disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Installer menu (Utilities menu for Tiger or Leopard.)
2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Note the SMART status of the drive in DU's status area. If it does not say "Verified" then the drive is failing or has failed and will need replacing. SMART info will not be reported on external drives. Otherwise, click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
3. Set the number of partitions from the dropdown menu (use 1 partition unless you wish to make more.) Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID (only required for Intel Macs) then click on the OK button. Click on the Partition button and wait until the volume(s) mount on the Desktop.
4. Select the volume you just created (this is the sub-entry under the drive entry) from the left side list. Click on the Erase tab in the DU main window.
5. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, check the button for Zero Data and click on OK to return to the Erase window.
6. Click on the Erase button. The format process can take up to several hours depending upon the drive size.
Steps 4-6 are optional but should be used on a drive that has never been formatted before, if the format type is not Mac OS Extended, if the partition scheme has been changed, or if a different operating system (not OS X) has been installed on the drive.

How would you set up your hard drives if you had these to work with

So I currently have :
1 internal 1 Tb 7200 HDD
1 internal 300gb 7200 HDD
This is all im using right now, but I also have a 3 TB external that I use to store media and also edit from. I was bringing the footage into the internal drives to edit from but space was growing thin.
I bought other drives to redo my entire hard drive set up while incorporating the old ones as well
1 2 Tb internal 7300 HDD
2 250gb SSD (They are however not the same brand.)
If someone could please give an opinion on how they would set these up from scratch that would be swell, or you can also recommend adding in another drive into the mix as well.

ok, the internals Im using now i can't get in to see the model numbers, but for the others they are;
Seagate Constellation ES.3 ST2000NM0033 2 TB 3.5" Internal Hard Drive - Newegg.com
Kingston SSDNow V200 Series SV200S3/256G 2.5" 256GB SATA III Internal Solid State Drive
SAMSUNG 840 EVO MZ-7TE250BW 2.5" 250GB SATA

Max memory, defragged hard drive, still seems slow

My 2GHz Core Duo Macbook seems to be running slow. I have 2 gigs of good ram, I defrag the hard drive and I don't use video software/ other rendering applications. I'm on 10.4.11 whatever could be the issue?

Which you can check by opening Activity Monitor. It may be that something you've put on is sucking up CPU. Printers can do this. Some widgets. Some system extensions.

Re-Setting Pram - Defragmenting Hard Drive

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