Re: Dual Install: Jaguar & Panther ???

Hi Steve,

At 14:51 -0800 2004-03-01, Steven Longenbohn wrote:
>I need some input from people who know the Mac platform quite well.
>Please respond to me since I am not a subscriber to the MagNet List. (Thanks!)
>
>We have a G4 (blue/white) tower Mac with Jaguar installed on it (one
>partition).
>Can both Jaguar and Panther be installed in such a way that we can
>dual-boot into the OS of choice for that session?

   Yes, absolutely. You can have multiple partitions, each with an
entirely independent, bootable copy of any Mac OS X version supported
by your Macintosh model ... and/or one or more partitions containing
Mac OS 9.x, if your model also supports this.

   You can then use the "Startup Disk" preferences panel (via "System
Preferences..." in the Apple menu) under Mac OS X, or the "Startup
Disk" control panel in Mac OS 9 (via "Control Panels" in the Apple
menu) to select the partition from which you'd like to the Macintosh
to boot. On newer Mac models, you can also choose a startup volume
via a GUI interface via the Startup Manager, which you can access by
holding down the Option key during startup.

   (As an aside, the "Blue & White" Macintosh model
<http://www.lowendmac.com/ppc/g3c.shtml> originally came with a G3
processor, although processor upgrades to a G4 have been available
from third parties ...)

>Do I need to partition the HD? (If so, what software do you use?)

   Apple includes a "Disk Utility" application with Mac OS X, which
you can use to format and partition disks. You can find it in
/Applications/Utilities.

>Can the existing partition be resized? On the PC, we can do this with
>Partition Magic. Is there a similar tool?

   Interestingly, columnist Dan Gillmor asked much the same question
about six weeks ago:

   http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor/archives/001688.shtml

   Most of the responses to date suggest backing up the data on your
partitions to another hard disk (even including an iPod's disk :-);
re-partitioning the entire drive, which destroys all data on the
drive; and then restoring the data onto each new partition.

   Backing up a bootable Mac OS X partition so it can be restored and
still remain bootable isn't straightforward. For this reason, there
were a number of recommendations for utilities such as Carbon Copy
Cloner <http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html> (freeware) or
SuperDuper!
<http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html>
(shareware) which are specifically intended for this purpose.

   As the first response to Dan Gilmour's question also pointed out,
there is also a command-line tool included with Mac OS X that can
potentially remove or create specific partitions. This can be a
primitive way of resizing certain partitions, perhaps by combining
two partitions into one, or breaking one partition into two smaller
partitions, while leaving the rest of your partitions untouched. Of
course, you'd only want to do this with partitions where you've
already backed up your data, using tools like those listed above :-).

   Doing this can be very dangerous, as you must follow an arcane
series of steps, and making a mistake can easily - and quickly -
destroy your data, not only in these partitions but elsewhere on your
drive, as well. You can find a tutorial on how to use it - including
many caveats - by searching for its name on
<http://www.macosxhints.com/>.

   One other option you can explore is FWB's Partition Toolkit
<http://www.fwb.com/html/partition_toolkit.html>. This may have been
one of the closest equivalents on the Macintosh to Partition Manager.
However, this product doesn't appear to have been updated in some
time, and thus should be approached with extreme caution. Partition
Toolkit runs only under Mac OS 9.1 and 9.2, and from one reader
report on Version Tracker
<http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macos/17170&vid=74174>,
at least, it doesn't support Firewire- or USB-connected drives.

Aron Roberts
Workstation Software Support Group

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Received on Mon Mar 1 16:10:22 2004