To partition or not in a new PB?

Hi,
I'm helping a friend set up their new 15" 1.67ghz pb and i was looking for some advice on partitioning the HD. I've never really done anything on a laptop, my main experience is with G4 towers and CRT imacs.
With my tower machines I usually have either a couple of HD's or if I have one larger drive, I partition it into at least two sections: one for system/apps and one for files.
My friends computer will have the stock 5400rpm 80gb drive, and will be used for a combination of word, email, internet, music, and adboe CS stuff (mostly indesign and illustrator).
So, I'm wondering if there are any pros or cons to partitioning drives in PB's or in tiger in general, because honestly, my habit of partitioning drives was learned in 9.0.4, mostly as a way to easily defrag the parts of drives that had a lot of audio recording files coming on and off all the time. having the system/application files on the part of the drive that didn't have so much data coming on and off all the time was always a big boost to disk performance for me.
these days I don't know, maybe it's less relevant in tiger? Or maybe not as neccesary when not in an audio recording environment with huge chunks of data coming on and off all the time? And I don't really have any experience using itunes/ipods. I am inclined to make a system partition, a files partition for word and design stuff, and then a partition that is just for itunes files...but maybe that's overkill. Any advice, experiences would be appreciated.
thanks.

When it comes to partitioning the choice to do so really comes down to how you use your computer and your personal preference. Even though there are less reasons to do so with Mac OS X there are still big benefits, and big drawbacks, of doing so. While there are more pros and cons than what I'm pointing out, not to mention millions of ways you can use those partitions, for me these are the main ones.
The cons
1) Fragmenting of disk space. This is probably be biggest drawback to paritioning your drive. The higher the number of partitions the worse this becomes.
2) Poor system performance. If you cramp your system partition and don't leave it enough space for its cache files etc you will find that system performance reduces and can potentially cause kernel panics. All it takes is a few unweildy applications, along with their own cache files etc, to give you problems in this area.
3) Higher maintenance. Having been a big fan of partitioning myself I always find instances where my paritioning is not optimal causing me to have to shuffle things around. This is just a huge waste of time.
4) Non-standard installation. For instance, if you wanted a second parition to be your home directory then your installation becomes somewhat non-standard and requires a lot more effort to setup.
The pros
1) Separation of system and data. You can choose to keep your data very separate from you system and applications. This scheme can make for simpler backup if you are only interested in backing up you data. Some people really like this and I used to do this with Mac OS 9 and earlier though now I find it too much trouble. If you're one of those people though
2) Separation of temporary data. Having had two partitions up until only very recently I found it very useful to have the second partition for temporary data along with data I'm not interested in backing up.
3) Second system startup. Two or more partitions does allow for a scond, or more, startup so if you want to mess around with a new piece of software or need an older version of Mac OS X, or Mac OS 9 for that matter, then this does make it very easy.
4) Cloning. If you split your drive into two similar sizes you can clone one parition to the other. Frequent travellers may find this incredibly useful as you would be self contained in an emergency. Being able to restore your system, excluding a drive failure of course, without any external devices is pretty neat.
EDIT: PS I've chosen to no longer parition because I find it simpler to just use an external hard drive.

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To partition or not to partition: that is the question

I bought an external hard drive (1 TB) that I plan to use to back up my MacBook Pro by activating Time Machine. I also plan to use this new drive to back up 2 other external drives: a 150 GB drive with all my photos and a 500 GB drive with iMovies. So I guess there are 2 questions: 1) Is this a really dumb idea ?, 2) Does it matter whether or not I partition the new drive to separate my TM backed up Mac Book Pro, the 150GB photo drive, and the 500GB movie drive ? If I do not partition the new drive and activate TM, does TM then back up all 3 ? Is that a bad thing ? I read the FAQ but lack enough computer savvy to completely understand it. Thanks for your help.

It's not a dumb idea. However, a TM backup drive should have at least twice the capacity of all the devices it backs up. If you plan to backup 150 GB and 500 GB drives plus your MBP's drive then your backup drive is too small. My guess is you need a minimum of 2 TBs just to backup your computer's drive and the 500 GB iMovies drive. You then need an additional 300 GBs for the 150 GB hard drive.
It does not matter whether you partition the drive. TM stores the backups of each drive separately. Partitioning may provide a little degree of safety in that corruption of one partition will not result in being unable to access the other partitions.
Now that said a better approach is to backup each drive to its own separate backup drive. This requires three drives - one for the computer, one for iMovies, and one for photos. The only drawback is that TM on a single computer cannot automatically backup to three separate drives. At each backup you would have to reconfigure TM prefs to use a different drive.
Another option is to replace the 1 TB drive with two 2 or 3 TB drives arranged as a mirrored RAID. This provides backup as well as redundancy protection against drive failure. This is my preferred option for backup.

Time machine not backing up new changes

Time machine was working perfectly fine until this past weekend. Now, it seems like it's not recognizing any new changed on my hard drive. The time machine still runs successfully, but it just repeats the same back up over and over again. I've checked the logs in console (see below)
Dec 15 00:35:25 localhost com.apple.backupd[6749]: Starting standard backup
Dec 15 00:35:25 localhost com.apple.backupd[6749]: Backing up to: /Volumes/Time Machine/Backups.backupdb
Dec 15 00:35:33 localhost com.apple.backupd[6749]: No pre-backup thinning needed: 424.6 MB requested (including padding), 281.50 GB available
Dec 15 00:35:34 localhost com.apple.backupd[6749]: Copied 5 files (33 bytes) from volume Macintosh HD.
Dec 15 00:35:34 localhost com.apple.backupd[6749]: Starting post-backup thinning
Dec 15 00:35:34 localhost com.apple.backupd[6749]: Deleted backup /Volumes/Time Machine/Backups.backupdb/Adrian Ma’s MacBook Pro/2009-12-13-233455: 281.50 GB now available
Dec 15 00:35:34 localhost com.apple.backupd[6749]: Post-back up thinning complete: 1 expired backups removed
Dec 15 00:35:34 localhost com.apple.backupd[6749]: Backup completed successfully.
I've also downloaded Time Tracker and it says that things were fine till this weekend and then everything for the past couple of days have 0 bytes backed up. Any ideas what could be the problem? I haven't done anything special or changed anything besides install Google Chrome. The external hard drive I back up to may have been unplugged/plugged but not before it's unmounted or the computer is off. I don't think I unmounted while time machine was backing up, but if I did could this be the problem?

ecanza wrote:
Solved! Thanks for the swift replies! I didn't do a Verify Disk, but I did do a Verify Disk Permissions without restarting recently.
Are you sure? Because +Verify Permissions+ doesn't do it. Only +*Verify Disk,+* or altering any partition on your boot drive.
There are some 3rd-party disk repair/maintenance apps that use the same internal OSX routine as +*Repair Disk,+* so if you used one of them, you'd have the same problem.
And by the way, there's no point to running +Verify Permissions+ -- you might as well just run +Repair Permissions.+
I just restarted and Time Machine has in fact "caught up" with the most recent changes! Cheers Pondini.
Oh, well, whatever it was, I'm glad it's fixed! And thanks for the star.

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All partitions are Journaled. All verify okay. The disk's partition map is GUID.
Disk utility will change the size of the 2nd and 3rd partition, but when I click on the first partition, the one I want to expand, it says "This partition can not be modified."
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Steve

Thanks, guys.
I ended up taking one of the existing partitions, making it smaller and then adding a partition of the size I needed -- created out of the space freed up. I also erased the original partition that I couldn't change and Disk Utility now says I can make it smaller, but not bigger.
Bottom line in my case -- all partitions except the first could be made smaller. But none could be made larger. (Maybe the first one couldn't be made smaller because it was full?). That caveat -- 'you can make 'em smaller but not larger' -- is not mentioned in the help file, but that's what I saw.
Make sense?
Thanks again,
Steve

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We have many new intel based IMacs with 1Tb internal drives. Each drive is partitioned into 6 and are in a university mac lab.
Occasionally some of the partitions are not mounted when the mac first boots up, so we have to go into disk utility and mount them manually. This happens on various machines at different times. We have NTFS-3G installed so I'm wondering if it's something to do with that.
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These are user-to-user forums, you are not talking to Apple here.
Audiobooks (and ringtones) are currently a one-time only download. I believe that they are all supplied to Apple by audible.com, so I assume that it's them who are requiring the one-time only download restriction. To get it onto your other devices you will need to sync it via a computer. Depending upon what country that you are in, Audible.com have their own app (Audiobooks from Audible) so you might be able to buy direct from them, though I don't know whether you can buy within their app or download audiobooks directly from them within the app e.g. whether they need to be copied via a computer.

Ok to format SYSTEM partition if not booting from original drive anymore?

I bought a SSD for my HP Pavilion dv7 and installed it as the primary boot drive, upgrading with a new copy of Windows at the same time. I use the original drive in the second slot for data, and have formatted the original C: partition, but not touched the other 3 partitions. I would like to be able to use at least one primary partition for another OS or as a backup partition. If I want to leave the recovery partition alone, and be able to run diagnostics, that means SYSTEM....Can the recovery tools work if they are not on the boot drive? If so, I can take the SYSTEM partition (the SSD has the active boot partition).
This question was solved.
View Solution.

Hi,
Unless the Bios can access the HP_TOOLS partition at boot ( which it will not be able to from the drive in the second bay ), you will lose the ability to run the extended diagnostics and the ability to have the bios flash execute on reboot. The bios will still be able to be updated, but the flash will run in the Windows environment which has more potential to cause problems.
However, the HP_TOOLS partition can be created on a flash drive or you could simply create it on your SSD - see the document on the link below regarding this - this is just as an example and the download included may not be correct for your particular notebook, so you would need to get this from your own Product page.
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareDownloadIndex?softwareitem=ob-101396-1&cc=uk&dlc=en&lc=en...
Regards,
DP-K
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Microsoft MVP - Windows Experience

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Victor,
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To partition or not in a new PB?

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