Originally posted by treebark7182:
Help me please 
i want to get a partition just for my os and applications and one partition for raw data. Problem is is that i only have one drive and i dont want to loose any of the data i have now. Any suggestions or help??? I have way too much stuff to just sit down and burn all of it to disk. Need a step by stepper if anyone can help. I've never partitioned with a mac before.
Well, if you have only one disk and you're not willing to copy some stuff to CD (why actually? You only would need to copy the user documents and apps, not the whole system), you will need an external disk.
I suggest FireWire. It's fast and cheap. If you don't want to buy a disk, you could try to get your local Apple dealer to let you use one in the show room for a couple of minutes.
The basic procedure is simple.
1. Check permissions and repair your disk.
2. Use CCC to copy over the entire disk (retaining all files, permissions, etc.) to a blank partition on your external FireWire disk.
3. Boot from the install CD. Format and partition the internal disk.
4. Install a new OS X onto your freshly formatted disk.
5. Copy back your old stuff from the external backup.
6. Depending on how you do it, you will need to use the terminal to set the right permission attributes (user ID basically) to the stuff you copied back. It's not hard, but it requires some terminal stuff if you don't want to do it all by hand the hard way. It's stuff like:
Code:
ditto -v -rsrcFork /Volumes/Backup/Users/old_user_name /Users/new_user_name
chown -R /Users/new_user_name new_user_name:staff
(where old_user_name could be the same as new_user_name BTW)
If you feel you can do that, it will be a piece of cake. If you're not familiar, we could walk you through it.
Since backups are so important and this situation could arise every so often I suggest you buy an external FireWire harddisk. They offer huge capacity and they're rather cheap even though speed is great.
Feel free to ask if you need more help.
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