Hi Bill Holton, You can repartition an external drive, and create both a fat32 windows partition and a mac os 10 extended journaled one with mac disk utility. You can then use the fat32 partition to share data between windows and the mac, and you can use the os10 partition to maintain a backup of everything on your mac. Let's begin by looking at how to resize your macintosh hd partition and have a sandbox beside it. It involves a few steps which I'll describe below. Not key by key though. I'll assume that you have some mac knowledge, but just don't know where to go yet, and in what order. Here you go.
First open disk utility, to carefully inspect your current configuration so that you know what you will be changing.. To do this, Go into the finder, say, your desktop, and press command shift u from there. This will open your utilities folder. Here, find disk utility dot app, and open it. In the disk table on the left, interact, and look at your current disk configuration. You need to know a few things before you go do something here. A disk is just a disk, and you cannot use it directly. It needs to have a partition to hold the file system, inside of which you can store files. There are many file systems, one of them is fat32, and another is mac os10 extended journaled. A filesystem lives inside a partition, so the partition is the container for the file system on the disk. From the disk perspective, you first have an empty disk. Then you create a partition on the disk, spanning all or only part of the disk size. As you are creating the new partition, you must choose which file system is going to live inside it, because The partition must be formatted for use with the type of file system that you want to use. In other words, the way you format your partition, becomes a property of the partition. So, on your external usb drive, you can have a fat32 partition, and a mac os10 partition, and you can have 2 separate mac os 10 extended journaled partitions on your internal mac hard drive. In both cases, You then just allocate one bit to the first partition, and the rest of the disk space to the other. You do this by setting the size text fields inside disk utility. See below. Once inside disk utility on the mac, you will see your hard disk as the brand of physical disk inside the machine, for example Hitachi 500gb. This item in the disk table is usually expanded, meaning there can be something inside it. And indeed, there is. It's your macintosh hd partition, formatted as mac os10 extended journaled, with a size of your entire disk. What you want to have, is not 1 big partition of 500 or 320 gb, what have you, but you would like to shrink the os10 partition and make it 20 gb smaller. You will use these 20 gigabytes for the sandbox partition. This can be done, but it can't be done non-destructively. In other words: resizing your partitions with disk utility is indeed destructive, because it will destroy all data on the disk. In all partitions. What you can do is back up everything, then recreate your macintosh hd partition 20 gb smaller, create a sandbocx partition beside it, and then restore your data. This is painless, as I experienced yesterday and today. You can use super duper. If you have one, take an external usb hard disk with as much space as you have on your internal hard drive in your mac. Your external disk can of course be larger, but you will need at most the size of your mac drive, if you have it filled up. Super duper can create a backup of your entire system, all apps, system files, preferences and all that. Even the unregistered version of super duper does it without restriction and will make the usb backup disk bootable too. Once everything is backed up, you can restart your mac and boot off of the external disk. Note: If you have no other usb disks connected other than your external backup hard disk, and as long as you only have 1 partition on the mac drive, you can boot from the usb disk by turning on your mac, and during the startup sound, hold down the option key for some 10 seconds or so. Release it, and you will be in a menu. The cursor is on macintosh hd, to boot from. Arrow left once, hit enter, and you will instead boot from the usb drive. It takes longer but it works. End of note. When booted from the external drive, you have your entire system as usual. Voice over as well. Because everything was backed up, both disk utility and super duper are on this external drive too. So now, start disk utility and look at what you have in the disk table. You will see your mac hard drive and its macintosh hd partition, you will see your external usb disk that you are now working from with its partitions, and you may see something called a super drive. That is simply your mac's internal cd dvd drive. Now, You want to repartition your internal mac hard drive into 2 new partitions: macintosh hd 20 gb smaller, and the sandbox partition being 20 gb in size. Put the cursor on the mac hard drive itself. Not on macintosh hd which is the partition inside it. If you now look at the rest of this disk utility screen, you will find a number of tabs. One of them is the partition tab. Push it with vo space. The screen changes to show partitioning options. This screen is self-explanatory, except for one thing. There can be a scroll area. First, you need to choose how many partitions you are going to have in the new layout. You will find a pop button for this. After you select to have 2 partitions, a scroll area will appear. It consists of 3 items: the first partition, a separator and the second partition. Focus on your first partition inside the scrool area and stop interacting. Now, look left and right of the scroll area, and you will find places to give the partition its size, name, and file system. Then go back to the scrool area again, focus on the second partition which is your sandbox, and fill in the details again for this partition. Then hit apply, let disk utility do its thing, and then exit disk utility. Now you have a macintosh hd partition 20 gb smaller, and you have your 20 gb sand box partition. Both partitions are in place but they are empty. Now, use super duper to restore from your external drive back to macintosh hd, so that your system is back normal again. In super duper, choose your external drive in the source pop up button, choose macintosh hd as the destination in the second pop up button, use the backup all files item in the next pop up button, and let it do its thing. Now, you can boot as usual and nothing should be different. All data is back on your drive, inside macintosh hd. Now for the sand box. Having booted normally, start super duper. Tell it to back up from macintosh hd, to the new 20 gb sandbox partition, using the choice named sandbox shared users as your backup method. Don't use smart update this time yet. You want to be sure that everything is backed up from macintosh hd to the sandbox partition. When done, close super duper. Now you have your sandbox in place. Forget about it, until you want to test a new device driver or piece of software. When that time has come, you will first need to boot from the new sandbox partition. To do that, either do it using the option key at startup, or go into system preferences, the item startup disk, and set it to boot from sandbox. This will hold for all subsequent boot ups, until you change it back. Once booted into your sandbox, install the software or drivers and try them out. Reboot when you want or need to. Sandbox will automatically be the booted partition because you did that in system preferences. If you are satisfied with the new software, you will have to install it a second time, but now on to your real macintosh hd partition. Go to system preferences, change the startup disk back to macintosh hd, reboot, and install your driver or software. Note: from time to time, it is a good idea to update your sandbox to reflect the state of your ever changing macintosh hd. To do this, use super duper. Backup from macintosh hd, to sandbox, backup all files, and use smart update to bring down the backup time. To turn on smart update, find the options button on the super duper screen, hit it and select smart update from a pop up button. Hit ok to close options and hit copy now. Your sand box is now up to date again, ready for the next unknown bit of software you would like to have a go at. Lastly, repartitioning your external drive should now be a snap. If you have further questions let me know. Hth, Paul. On Sep 14, 2011, at 3:07 PM, Bill Holton wrote: > Thanks. The sandbox seems like it would also be a more convenient way to > get into the Mac if your main system gets messed up. How hard is it to > repartition your ddrive on the fly? > Also, any suggestions on what I should do with my coming USB drive so I can > use it both to use SuperDuper and have space to swap it to my Windows PC to > back it up with a PC backup program? > Thanks. > Bill > > > -----Original Message----- > From: macvisionaries@googlegroups.com > [mailto:macvisionaries@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Paul Erkens > Sent: Wednesday, September 14, 2011 9:04 AM > To: macvisionaries@googlegroups.com > Subject: Re: Questionabout Super Doopper and external drives > > Hi Bill, James and others, > > Super duper is equal in its functionality as far as backing up and bootable > backups go. CCC is free. Super duper costs 30 dollars or so. Super duper has > an extra bit of functionality though, that I really love, now that I messed > up my system installing the wrong drivers and so on in the past. Super duper > allows you to create a sand box. A sand box is an entire copy of your mac os > 10 system installation residing on another partition of your hard drive, > that you can use to play around with software updates, system drivers you > install such as mac fuse and others, and you can mess with applications, > before you go ahead and actually install them for real into your main > macintosh hd. If you want to test a new hardware device driver, and you are > not sure of the outcome, whether or not it is going to disturb you or > something in your system, you can install the new driver inside the sandbox. > if you find out that everything works just fine inside your second os, the > sandbox, then you can safely install the new drivers into your real system. > What super duper does, is that it requires you to repartition your drive > into 2 pieces. One for your normal system, and a 20 gb partition for the > sandbox. > But then, Once that is done, you have the great advantage of testing new > drivers and software inside your sandbox, before taking the plunge to > install them into the daily operating system. If, on the other hand, you > find that the driver is not working for you, is too intrucive or what ever > reason you may have to discard it, then all you need to do is copy your > clean macintosh hd system files over to the sandbox, replacing the mess you > created there. Now, you also got rid of the faulty driver in the sandbox. > No matter if you boot from your macintosh hd or from the sandbox partition, > you always have your documents etc at hand. This is because if you boot from > macintosh hd, then the documents are accessible as usual. But from the > sandbox, they are reference using symbolic links, so that, even though the > sandbox is just a copy of the real os, you can access all your private stuff > from there too. That is wonderful in super duper. You should very carefully > read the manual though, before you begin sandboxing, so that you are aware > of what's happening. For example, you should never copy the sandbox back to > macintosh hd. That makes you loose all your private stuff. > > CCC can backup and make the backup bootable, so if you don't need the sand > box functionality, then ccc is perfect too. > > On Sep 13, 2011, at 6:31 PM, Bill Holton wrote: > >> Hi. >> I have a 2 tarabyte drive on its way, and I have a few questions about Mac >> backups. >> First, as I seem to recall, with Superdooper you can create a backup in a >> format you can actually boot from, if the system becomes trashed? Is this >> correct? Is SuperDooper the only package that allows this,or does time >> Machine, also? >> Second question: How would I configure the drive so I can use it to back > up >> my Mac, but also swap it out to my PC to back it up? Guessing I'll need > to >> create two partitions? If so, how do I create the correct two using > Tiger? >> Thanks. >> Bill >> >> >> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "MacVisionaries" group. >> To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com. >> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. >> For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en. >> > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "MacVisionaries" group. > To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en. > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "MacVisionaries" group. > To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. 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