Hard drive partition on a MacBook

[Chris]

I guess I´m just too old and not sufficiently interested to put in the time but I can´t get my head around my MacBook OS etc.after 20 odd years of windows so I am thinking of using the OS-X for the audio side of things, Itunes and reading web mail and forums with Safari and then partitioning the HD for windows for the rest of my Office programmes and Word documents etc. I know I will waste/lose a lot of space, having to accomodate 2 OSs but I store my music on an external drive and I don´t need all that much anyway. My Macbook has a 160Gb drive - how do you suggest I split it, always giving top priority to audio ?

[Filterlab]

Well, to avoid the hassle of dual booting (I assume you'd run Boot Camp) you could have a try of Parallels which enables the simultaneous running of two operating systems (say OSX and XP for example) without requiring separate booting or even partitioning. To be honest partitioning is only really necessary for huge hard drives that frequently search through and shift a lot of data over thousands of folders and files. Personally I store on and run music from offboard hard drives and leave the internal hard drive only for the OS and the applications, works fine, and these days space is cheap cheap cheap!

Oh, one thing with Parallels is that (like Boot Camp) you need anti virus software for the Microsoft side of things. As OSX emulates XP it is prone to the normal viruses whilst the Microsoft window is open (and obviously connected to the internet). However, as the anti virus runs only on the Microsoft window it won't get in the way of the Apple side of things.

[Beechwoods]

Definitely a wise idea to have your music on a separate drive. That way it's not competing for read/write time with other processes.

Whatever you do make sure you backup your music. I lost 500Gb of music a while back and it couldn't be retrieved, even professionally, so having two drives, with a regular backup schedule, so you always have a current archive is a small price to pay, especially with discs so cheap these days.

[Filterlab]

Time Machine mate, although it's slightly drive hungry.

I copied my music files the other day, took hours!

[Beechwoods]

I hear ya, and I use Time Machine for all my system, work in progress and non-audio backups. It is brilliant in terms of rolling back your system, or bits of your system, an app or a folder, to a prior state.

Time Machine has a really clever file system that only stores a file once, with pointers to the dates it's good for, regardless of how many times it's been 'backed up', providing it's not changed. It's only file hungry 'cos it backs up everything and you'd be surprised how many things change every day on yer average Apple system

For music though, I like Carbon Copy Cloner because it gives you a copy to another place which is 'plug and go' - While it's clever, I have concerns about the way Time Machine stores stuff in a database of sorts. More to go wrong, get corrupted and whatever. This is why I avoid RAID as well. The RAID controller is just another thing that can go wrong. So I keep it simple and use an app that just copies my data securely to another drive on a regular schedule.

If anything happens to my primary drives, I just swap them with my backup drive and there I go. Buy a new drive, backup to that one, and you're back to scratch again

[Chris]

There we have it in a nutshell, I haven´t the faintest idea what boot camp or time machine are - therein lies the rub. I bought a Mac because I was told it was great for audio and virus-free webbing and I can´t see myself wanting anything else from it apart from writing translations inside Words and a few spreadsheets.
No,
I don´t think I would use a parallel thing. When using an audio application I wouldn´t be using a Windows one and vice-versa. I´d prefer to boot into windows for the very rare occasion I might need it to use Office programmes/documents and <I would stick to Apple for Audio and Internet. Any ideas on partition sizes ?

[Filterlab]

Boot Camp: An application that enables a Mac to boot into another operating system from start-up.

Time Machine: A built-in application which backs up the Mac at a specified interval and allows the user to travel back in time (as such) and roll back the OS and associated files to a specific point.

Check out Open Office, it's a completely free office package that works exactly the same as Microsoft Office but for ANY platform. All files interchange with no intervention (.doc, .xls, .pps etc etc) and the GUI is identical. By the way, to partition your hard drive you have to back everything up and then partition and re-install the OS from the OS boot disk. It's not easy on a machine already in use, but you don't need to worry about doing that anyway. You will have to run either Boot Camp or Parallels if you want to run Windows only applications, there's little choice.

[Beechwoods]

Open Office is a great app. It works with Office and follows many of the intuitive standards that Office established.

Parallels Desktop is useful in that it lets you run a Windows app in a 'window' while you're booted into OSX. It means that you don't need to worry about rebooting your machine to run a Windows app. If you don't need any Windows apps while you're playing music, don't open them and they won't steal any resources. It also means you don't need to worry about re-partiioning the drive to make room for a traditional Windows installation.

If you did go down the second route, you'd only need a 5 Gb partition for Windows XP (not sure how much Boot Camp needs, but Boot Camp is needed to allow Windows to be installed onto Apple hardware). You could make the partition bigger to allow more room for documents etc that you might create and only want to access within Windows but equally you could create a (third) partition for any documents, separate from the Windows OS installation, and the OSX installation.

Parallels might seem odd and scary but I would really give it a go. You should find it far more satisfactory than switching between OSX and Windows.

http://www.parallels.com/products/desktop/

[Filterlab]

Parallels might seem odd and scary but I would really give it a go. You should find it far more satisfactory than switching between OSX and Windows.

http://www.parallels.com/products/desktop/

Concur 100%, it's going to be the simplest and most efficient method of achieving your goal.