For example, I normally run Mac OS 9 on my WallStreet, but I also keep a copy of Mac OS 8.1 on another partition, which is very useful when I occasionally have to use older software that is not supported by Mac OS 9. Just boot from your alternate system, and if the troubles disappear, you can be pretty sure of your diagnosis and take remedial action.Īnother advantage of having operating systems on several partitions is that you can keep different versions of the Mac OS handy.

Speaking of troubleshooting and hard drive corruption problems, having a backup operating system installed on a partition separate from the one where your normal working system resides can be very convenient when you suspect system problems. Other potential advantages provided by hard drive partitioning are slightly faster drive access, because the drive heads don’t have to traverse as far to find a file within a smaller volume, and enhanced organization, for people who like to keep one kind of file – say documents – in one drive partition and applications in another.Īlso, should one partition become corrupted, the possibility exists that the other partition or partitions may not be damaged, and data on them will be recoverable.

For example, when I partitioned my PowerBook 5300’s 500 MB hard drive into four partitions, I instantly gained more than 30 MB of usable storage space. The solution, before Apple introduced its extended file system (HFS+)** with Mac OS 8.1 in January 1998, was to partition the hard drive into several smaller volumes, each with a smaller block size than the original single volume. However, as hard drive capacities expanded to 500 MB and beyond, the minimum file size, even for documents with just a couple of lines of text in them, became unreasonably large. This was not much of a problem back in the days when an 80 MB drive was considered large. The old Macintosh hierarchical file system (HFS)* divided each volume into approximately 65,500 blocks, which represented the highest number of data units that could theoretically be stored on the drive – no matter how large it was. What are the advantages associated with partitioning a hard drive? Well, prior to the introduction of Mac OS 8.1, the most compelling reason to partition was that it could gain you a substantial amount of hard drive space, especially on larger drives. I’m a fan of hard drive partitioning and have had four partitions on the 500 MB hard drive in my PowerBook 5300 and on the 2 GB unit in my PowerBook WallStreet G3. 2000: When you partition a hard drive, each partition functions as a separate volume and appears on your desktop with its own icon and name.

Partition wd my book for mac