[superfula]

Wickedkitten posted this over at neowin, so i thought I'd share the wealth here

http://www.subrosasoft.com/thestore/...roducts_id=431

VolumeWorks enables you to resize and manage partitions (volumes) on your hard drives. Unlike traditional methods Volumeworks allows you to shrink or expand partitions without erasing them. It is able to hide partitions from most users, and can be used to delete or create partitions. Written specifically for Mac OS X - it supports most native drive formats (SCSI, ATA, USB, Firewire, etc.).


Personally, I really want to go out and buy this now, as it's really the only thing I think OS X is lacking vs windows. Anyone care to be the guinea pig? I'm so close to volunteering.

[Randman]

I'm not a big fan of partitioning. Never really seen a good reason to do it on a Mac.

[Millennium]

Originally posted by Randman:
I'm not a big fan of partitioning. Never really seen a good reason to do it on a Mac.

Technically there's not much real reason to do so, unless you're on a Beige G3.

From an aesthetic standpoint it's better to run OSX and OS9 from separate partitions if you dual-boot, simply because the two filesystems will look cleaner than a single jubled mess. However, there's no technical necessity for this; it just looks nicer (and can be a bit less confusing to humans, but the machine won't care either way).

[albook]

Originally posted by Randman:
I'm not a big fan of partitioning. Never really seen a good reason to do it on a Mac.

Hmmm, without partitions you will not be able to use your Mac!
No Partitions >> No Filesystem >> No Mac OS...

[gorickey]

This sounds promising...in various troubleshooting techniques I use a Mercury On-the-Go FireWire bus-powered drive that is split into (3) partitions of varying sizes:

1.) XBoot (a bootable 10.3 system)

2.) Utilities&More (Various created .asr Images/all diagnostic software/Downloaded updates/Patches/etc.)

3.) Extra Space (used to backup critical data/user profiles of /Users before reimaging the machine)

Now, I often find myself having problems getting the latest .asr Image on the second partition as it's growing rapidly and the Images are upwards of 4GB+ each; however, I don't really need all the space in partition #3, so if I can easily shrink that down to increase partition #2 without having to re-do the whole partition scheme, that's awesome...

[Fonzie]

Originally posted by Randman:
I'm not a big fan of partitioning. Never really seen a good reason to do it on a Mac.

Well from my viewpoint it's great to have 2 or 3 partitions because I have alot of icons and wallpapers and music that I do not want to burn out on cd's or dvd's when doing a reinstall which I had to do recently and lost alot of data. So all my icons and wallpapers are on a different partition - thus allowng me to go nuts with my boot partition.

[Randman]

Yeah, but if your hard drive goes bad, a partition won't help when it comes to using a backup.

[C.J. Moof]

Originally posted by gorickey:
This sounds promising...in various troubleshooting techniques I use a Mercury On-the-Go FireWire bus-powered drive that is split into (3) partitions of varying sizes:

1.) XBoot (a bootable 10.3 system)

2.) Utilities&More (Various created .asr Images/all diagnostic software/Downloaded updates/Patches/etc.)

3.) Extra Space (used to backup critical data/user profiles of /Users before reimaging the machine)

Now, I often find myself having problems getting the latest .asr Image on the second partition as it's growing rapidly and the Images are upwards of 4GB+ each; however, I don't really need all the space in partition #3, so if I can easily shrink that down to increase partition #2 without having to re-do the whole partition scheme, that's awesome...

Why is that setup better than one partition with a folder called Utilities&More with all your .asr and whatnot in it? Awesome is not having to muck about with resizing partitions at all. You've described exactly why partitions don't save any work- you've created an unnecessary limitation that you now have to work around.

If you're really set on really keeping things separate, Disk Images work nicely.

[Fonzie]

Originally posted by Randman:
Yeah, but if your hard drive goes bad, a partition won't help when it comes to using a backup.

Why should it go bad? I've had a hardrive in my pc and Amiga that worked just fine when doing a day's work. If there's a higher rate of faulty HD's in Macs then Apple should rethink which HD-company they should use.

Maxtor is my bet for a good hd- never turned on me.

If my HD should go bad I would get some hints and take the necessary steps. I would think.

[Randman]

If I'm going to do a reinstall, I'd rather do it cleanly. I have a Maxtor external drive (and an iPod) for backups.
But if you're not worried about system failures, why partition?
Sorry Fonzie, but you haven't given any reasons for a partition. If anything, I'd say your recalcitrant attitude reinforces my point. You takes your chances, you takes your risk.

[C.J. Moof]

Originally posted by Fonzie:
Why should it go bad?

Well, as the phrase goes, "poop happens". I've only seen 2 die in my years as a pro, but I've seen 2 up and die.

If harddrives were fantastically reliable, RAID 5 wouldn't exist.

[gorickey]

Originally posted by C.J. Moof:
Why is that setup better than one partition with a folder called Utilities&More with all your .asr and whatnot in it? Awesome is not having to muck about with resizing partitions at all. You've described exactly why partitions don't save any work- you've created an unnecessary limitation that you now have to work around.

Good points; however, in the case of needing "clean" and sometimes multiple booting systems (10.2/10.3) it's much nicer to be able to throw that on something like "Extra Space" and then delete that partition later on after use...

[superfula]

Most users DON'T have a backup harddrive or ipod they can just copy stuff to. Even if I did, it would have to be one huge hd to fit everything...300gig to be exact. I partition because I don't want to lose everything if I have to format the OS X partition or reinstall. I've gotten burned from it before.

I really don't see a reason why you wouldn't partition. Aside from what I said above, it keeps things so much more organized. I have a partition where all my setup files go, one for Multimedia (movies, pics, and audio), and one setup for my home directory. It is so much easier to have the home directory on a second partition.

[TazmanDman]

also for those of us who like to play with yellow dog/mandrake linux and back can experiment and then delete partitions as necessary without any OS X reinstalls - sounds like a good reason to me.

- Taz

[bbales]

Has anyone actually tried the repartitioning software? I'd love to know if it works well.

[superfula]

Yeah I have. No problems here.

[bbales]

Hmmm -- For $50, though, I wonder if I wouldn't be smarter to put that same amount of money to a new drive! Haven't made up my mind yet...
Thanks for the info.

[chabig]

I partition because I don't want to lose everything if I have to format the OS X partition or reinstall.

Reinstalls are not done very often, and when they are they don't destroy user data. So this is not really a reason to partition.

I really don't see a reason why you wouldn't partition. Aside from what I said above, it keeps things so much more organized. I have a partition where all my setup files go, one for Multimedia (movies, pics, and audio), and one setup for my home directory. It is so much easier to have the home directory on a second partition.

More organized than a simple folder?

Chris

[superfula]

Originally posted by chabig:
Reinstalls are not done very often, and when they are they don't destroy user data. So this is not really a reason to partition.


More organized than a simple folder?

Chris

I'm not talking reinstalls. I'm talking formats. As in the "I'm upgrading to 10.4 and I want to start fresh and safe" formats.

An organized folder is one more level deep than partitions.

[Randman]

Originally posted by superfula:
I'm not talking reinstalls. I'm talking formats. As in the "I'm upgrading to 10.4 and I want to start fresh and safe" formats.

Youu can do a clean install, or you can do an archive and install just as easily.

Originally posted by superfula:
An organized folder is one more level deep than partitions.

What do you mean by that?

[superfula]

Originally posted by Randman:
Youu can do a clean install, or you can do an archive and install just as easily.

What do you mean by that?

I realize that. What's the point of formatting if you choose the archive option?

A folder is one level below the harddrive.

[Spheric Harlot]

Originally posted by superfula:
I realize that. What's the point of formatting if you choose the archive option?

What's the point of formatting?

I think I've done three, maybe four reformats (excluding setting up new machines) in fifteen years of Mac-userdom, all but one related to re-partitioning. The remaining one followed a hard disk crash - in 1991.

Originally posted by superfula:
A folder is one level below the harddrive.

So?

[ajhoughton]

Originally posted by superfula:
Wickedkitten posted this over at neowin, so i thought I'd share the wealth here

http://www.subrosasoft.com/thestore/...roducts_id=431

Personally, I really want to go out and buy this now, as it's really the only thing I think OS X is lacking vs windows. Anyone care to be the guinea pig? I'm so close to volunteering.

It's a bit of a blatant plug, but there's also my program, iPartition, which you can get here

Coriolis Systems

and has a similar feature set. Since I've tested it, I'm pretty happy about using it (provided I've backed stuff up in case of things like power cuts, lightning strikes, kernel panics etc.).

Regards,

Alastair.

[Spheric Harlot]

very nice site.