Panther and partition sizes?

[cb911]

i'm doing a clean install of Panther and i'm going to set up some partitions.

i'm just wondering what size i should make my OS X (system) partition? currently my OS X partiton is 10GB, with 2.3GB free. this is okay for Panther isn't it? i'm hoping that the Panther install without extra languages & print drivers etc won't be much larger than Jaguar. can anyone let me know if 10GB would be enough for Panther and extra Apple apps that have to be installed on the OS X partition?

i'm also thinking of having an additional boot partition, for installing a different OS, maybe linux or something. i don't want to use too much space for this partition, would 5GB or even 4-3.5GB be enough for linux or something?

so here's my whole partition plan (80GB HD):

OS X system: 10GB

extra boot volume: 3.5GB?

scratch (downloads): 5GB

leaving the rest (approx 55GB after formatting) for storage & documents.

would anyone else who's using partitions like to mention their suggestions?

good ideas and suggestions are much appreciated.

 

[crenz]

Hmm... Actually, I didn't bother to create any partitions on my Powerbook so far. I just have it all in one partition and prefer it that way. Is there a reason you want to have so many reasons? I thought HFS+ is much less wasteful that FAT on Windows...

 

[Mr. Anderson]

I found a 6 gig drive laying around here at work and I'm going do a clean install of Panther on that when I get it. You only need 2 gigs or 3.5 gigs with the developer tools for Panther.

This way I'll be able to check it out and run all my apps. There might be an ATI video card and Lightwave/OpenGL issue that was just fixed this month with OSX.2.8 that caused the system to hangup. I was rebooting 6 times a day and ATI finally got around to making a hotfix for the card - pain in the ass.

So I can't afford to have it happen again if the fix isn't valid for Panther.....

D

 

[mklos]

The only problem with making a small partition for Mac OS X.3 (Panther) is that some applications will ONLY install on the partition that you booted from. Depending on how many OS X applications your going to install will depend on how much space you need on your partition. Also note that Panther WILL be a little bigger than Jaguar.


I always make the first partition double the amount of memory that I have and use it as a swap partition. After you install Mac OS X, download a program called swapcop from http://www.versiontracker.com and use it to change your swap file over from the partition your installed OS X on to your first partition. You could see up to a 10% increase in speed. If you put it in the first partition then its on the outside of your Hard Drive which is the fastest part of the drive. Also don't put anything else on that partition. When you make the partition name it .swap. If you put a dot in front of it then it won't appear on your desktop. In UNIX, any file with a dot in front of its file name makes it invisible.

 

[cb911]

i'd like to only have the one partition... but i'm a bit suspicious about doing that. i tend to mess with stuff like themes and haxies and i'd hate to have my system partiton mess up with all of my stuff on it. i used to have a seperate partiton for all of my apps so that if i had to reinstall OS X all of my apps would still be there.

so isn't there anyone else using so many partitons? the reason i want to have so many is as follows: i really want to keep OS X sperate so if i mess it up i'm not risking my documents. i want to have the seperate scratch partiton to use for a scratch disk as well as having all of my downloads there, basically just all unimportant stuff that i can delete. does all that sound reasonable, or am i just paranoid?

i'd really like to just have 1 partiton, so if someone could assure me that my documents woulnd't be in danger on the 1 partition i might consider it.