

Ask HN: OS X Partitioning Advice - jason_slack

Hi All,<p>I just upgraded my drive in my MacBook to a 500gb hybrid from Seagate as well as 8gb of RAM.<p>I am looking for partitioning advice. I know there are some work arounds that need to be done to accomplish this and I just don;t know the best approach.<p>I need:<p>-1 large snow leopard partition. My main partition.<p>-1 small Windows 7 partition<p>-1 small partition for "OS X Developer Previews"
(obviously I cannot voilate any NDA's)<p>I don't really want to run virtual machines for Windows, but if I did, then this becomes easy as it is possible to run multiple OS X versions and I have done this many times.<p>I know that if I decided to throw in a small Linux partition (which I would only use once in a great while for testing) that it complicates even more.<p>Advice is appreciated.
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mishmash
Depending on your usage ~20GB should be enough for Windows - but you'll want
to get it right because resizing an NTFS volume is a pain (with something like
WinClone).

The second OS X partition, I don't think there aren't any DPs other than
10.6.5 that have been released to Mac Developer Program members (unless you're
a Select or Premier?) and you can always install and use the included
reversioner.... now 10.7 will be a different story when it comes along, but
another ~10GB should be enough.

I would put the rest of your disk to the main partition. You can startup the
Mac from your boot DVD or find a Snow Leopard image and an external drive
somewhere to use Disk Utility to repartition.

edit: of course repartitioning will erase the drive, so backup carefully.

edit2: actually, Disk Utility does have non-destructive partition editing but
it hasn't worked the two times I've tried it, giving an error about unmovable
files or something, but it might still be worth a try.

