Partitioning Drive?

[Jon Warms]

Add my vote to the partitioning side, with a condition.

Partitioning a hard drive increases the "sweat factor" a little bit, 
especially so for newbies. It's a close call either way, so don't 
partition if it'll raise your stress level too high.

I like the emergency partition concept, and I use it on my drives. OS X 
has a feature that allows you to select the startup system at boot time 
(power-on time) by holding the option key as you start (or re-start) 
the computer. It will then search for usable systems and present the 
selection to you to choose from. HOWEVER, it only finds one system per 
partition/volume. If your OS X folder has become corrupted and 
unusable, it won't offer you any other system in the same partition. 
But it will find and offer any usable systems in other partitions (or 
volumes).

I don't like three partitions. All computers slow down, and your 
flexibility/usability becomes restricted, when the volume in use is 
almost full. And some applications force you to use the startup volume 
for their [large] files.

I do like the idea of one large partition with a second, smaller 
partition (4 to 8 GB) for an another system folder.

Jon

On Tuesday, May 20, 2003, at 03:08 PM, Mac OS X Newbies wrote:

> Why an emergency partition? Well, if your regular startup volume gets
> munged, you can boot off your system software CD or DVD, but you can
> only use Disk Utility, which may not be enough. A third-party disk
> utility usually comes with its own startup CD, but, again you can only
> use that utility. Moreover, the software on a CD is frozen in time --
> you can't add other tools or update it. It's easier to have a separate
> partition than burning a bootable CD each time you upgrade your disk
> utility or want to add another tool on it.