On Wednesday, June 11, 2003, at 09:01 AM, Rod Clifford wrote: > Question regarding the concept of partitioning: > The sysyem is kept on its own partition it seems. Startup disk still > works the same in the control panel? As updates & patches are released > there are no special requirements to install on that partition? Everything works exactly the same in the startup disk Control Panel/System Preference. Nothing special. No patches. Where did you get that idea? You put OS X on it's own FIRST partition and OS 9.2.2 on it's own SECOND partition to keep them from commingling. > Silly question: is the reason for partitioning a performance gain or > to keep the individual partitions from fragmenting as quickly? As with > most Mac owners, I dump everything on a single partitioned hard drive. Exactly. Both and HD longevity. By having dedicated OS X and OS 9.2.2 partitions, they remain confined to their assigned spaces and fragment much less than they would across a huge unpartitioned HD. X also uses the empty space on it's partition for all the invisible OS X swap files which can get quite large. The main thing is to CONFINE OS X to a limited but large enough first partition so the system doesn't become scattered all over the entire drive and cause the HD head to be racing all over the place for system parts as it gets more and more fragmented with every system update and addition. Such wild system parts over-searching can reduce the lifetime of the HD as the mechanical head must do much more work to keep track of all the system parts scattered hither and yon. I was out of space on my WD 100 inside and had only dedicated an 8GB partition for OS X. This turned out to be much too small. It was at more than 7GB before building up swap files and would sometimes get as big as all but 20MB of space left when its performance would collapse. I had to do something and that's when Nic's message from Italy came in. I was about to put in a new 120 when Nic mentioned that his friend had told him about the partition size loophole and I simply put the 250 in instead. Have no fear, just make 4 partitions with Dick Utility and your 180 will do quite nicely inside your Cube. Make sure you invoke the "Install Mac OS 9 Drivers" option so you will see all of them in OS 9 as well as in OS X. k "T-Minus 2 Weeks And Counting" <http://www.apple-zone.com> "iPod Old vs. New - A Comparative Analysis" <http://www.ipod-zone.com> "Loophole Lets Big Hard Drives Inside Cubes" <http://www.cube-zone.com>