[apollo11]

MBP core 2 duo , 120 gig Hd about 60 gigs free. Running Snow Leopard and a multitude of software and stored files

Buying Disk warrior 4.2. I would like to partition off 10 gigs on the boot volume and install Snow Leopard and DW, booting from this partition to repair the remaining partion-the mainly used working volume.

ie can I partition a live volume using disk utility without having to re-install everything?

Thanks for your help

[Art Vandelay]

Yes you can but you don't need to since DW comes with a bootable DVD.

[apollo11]

Thanks for your prompt reply Art, If my experience with DW 3 is anything to go by booting from the DW 4-DVD takes ages.

The partition idea was suggested in an article elsewhere and may help save time. I am often reluctant to run DW over my misbehaving drive due to the long boot time.

What will DW do when Apple drop optical media and go to flash drive only with no card readers?

[Art Vandelay]

I just used DW 4.2 this morning to check a drive and it only took about 45 seconds to boot from the DVD.

DW could be shipped on a flash-based thumb drive if optical drives are no longer included.

[apollo11]

Okaaay! 45 secs, that is much faster than I expected Art.

Oh well I need not bother doing as I wanted above.

Would a second boot volume be useful to repair the other boot volume, instead of using disk utility off the installation disc?

I'll just need to dig out my DW 3 serial number to order DW 4. Thank you for your help

[reader50]

Most people don't want to take their DVDs along on the road. An emergency boot partition is a good idea on any laptop.

It lets you repair the primary volume. In case that can't be done (or will take hours) it can let you work on your files too. Install a few critical applications, then copy across your data files before beginning the repairs.

You can use iPartition to adjust partitions on an existing drive, without losing data. Boot Camp can apparently be used to do the same on Intel Macs. Just skip the Windows-Install step, use the new partition to install Mac OS instead.

[Art Vandelay]

Disk Utility can do it too.

[Simon]

Emergency partitions are nice.

But never on your internal disk. Don't partition it for that. Wrong way to do it.

What you want to do is get an 8GB or 16GB USB stick. Clone your OS X install DVD or your DW DVD to that. Add any other tools you might need. Use DiskUtility > Restore to do the cloning.

That's your emergency partition. No reason to fiddle with your internal drive and partitioning.