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Panther: Partitioning and CloningBy Francine Schwieder |
The first and best thing you can do for yourself is to know that sooner or later you will have trouble and therefore need to have a backup of everything. And I do mean everything! In fact, you should have at least 3 copies of all files that are important to you. The easiest way to accomplish this is to buy yourself a second drive that is bigger than the drive you have, then clone (make an exact copy) your internal drive to the second drive. Be sure to get into the habit of regularly copying changed files to the backup drive. Something catastrophic will happen when you haven't backed up stuff recently. It's Murphy's Law as it applies to computer use.
I use a nifty little shareware program called ChronoSync from Econ Technologies to do my regular backups. It costs a mere $30, and is worth it for the convenience. Also get in the habit of regularly burning your data to CDs or DVDs, so if disaster strikes the most you will lose is some time, not your precious photos, text files, movies, music or whatever. When I got my first computer my brother, Frank Chism, who has worked with pretty much every sort of computer starting in 1965, told me the secret computer guru mantra, "Backup, backup, backup. Three backups on three different media, and if you have really important data store one copy off-site. There are users who have lost data, and users who haven't lost any yet, but will. Backup!"
So you've bought yourself a new firewire drive that is bigger than your internal drive and plugged it in. Now what?
If you get the message that the Mac can't read the drive, click the button to initialize it and proceed to the next step. It's likely that the Mac can see your new drive, even if it is formatted for Windows, which is pretty often the case and can lead you to the mistake that all is fine. It's not. In order to make a bootable drive it must be formatted for the Mac. In either case, launch Disk Utility from your Applications/Utilities folder. You'll notice the left panel has the drive, for instance IBM, and indented under the drive is the volume or partition name. You can elect to erase a whole drive or an individual partition, select the format for the drive (unfortunately all partitions on the drive must be the same format, so you can't have a drive with two partitions, one formatted for Mac and one for Windows). If you are using Panther select Mac OS Extended (journaled) as the format. Give your drive a name. If you can boot into OS 9 make sure to check the box to install the OS 9 Driver. Click the Erase button and your new drive will be formatted for your Mac.
Whether you partition the drive or not is up to you. If you got a really big drive you might consider several partitions. I got a 200GB La Cie drive, and I had two internal drives of 60GBs each and a 20GB iBook, so I made a partition as big as each drive, plus one partition for the iBook, and one for files only.
If you decide you do want to partition, then with your new disk selected, click the Partition tab. From the drop down menu under Volume Scheme select the number of partitions you want. Click in each partition and give it a name, select the format, and either type a number in the Size box, or drag the little marker between each partition to get the right sizes. This is easier than doing the math. Again, if you can boot into OS 9 be sure to check the box to install the 9 drivers. Click the Partition button, then click Partition again (you get a chance to change your mind because partitioning erases everything that was on the drive, so the program wants to make sure you are doing this on purpose).
If you have the Finder Preference under General set to show CDs, DVDs and iPods on the Desktop, then all the partitions for your firewire drive will now show up on your Desktop. I know, a firewire drive would seem, to any normal person, to be a hard disk. But whoever said the programmers writing code for systems were normal people? I've sent feedback to Apple pointing out that a firewire drive is, well, a drive, not a CD. It is no more, nor less, removable media than the internal drives are. Maybe in Tiger they'll set it up more sensibly. But I wouldn't count on it.
Now that you have a place to clone your drive to that is at least as big as, and preferably bigger than, your internal drive, it is time to make the copy. Still in Disk utility click on the name of your startup volume (in my case it is Panther), then click the Restore tab in the right pane.
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Before you do the copy, click on the desktop icon for your backup volume to select it, in my case it is PantherBU, and then do Get Info. Under the Ownerhip and Permissions section you'll see a check box for "Ignore ownership on this volume." If you want a bootable drive, and I can't imagine why you wouldn't, as having a drive you can boot from if something goes wrong is rather the whole point of this exercise, make sure this box is NOT checked.
Back to the Disk Utilities window. Click and drag the startup volume in the left pane into the Source field of right pane, then drag the volume you are cloning to into the Destination field of the right pane. Click the Restore button. Go have a nice cup of tea and a scone while everything is copied. That's it. You can now boot from the firewire drive either by selecting it in System Preferences->Startup Disk, or, if you have a reasonably new Mac, you can hold down the Option key when you boot and choose it there (this takes a bit longer to load up than you would expect).
If your computer won't boot from the firewire drive, and you know that your model is supposed to be able to do so, the most likely problem is that you failed to uncheck the Ignore Ownership option in GetInfo. Go back to GetInfo for the volume, and see if that is the case. If the box is checked, uncheck it, then try going to Disk Utilities, selecting the volume in the left panel, click the First Aid tab, and run Repair Permissions. The Repair Permissions function works by checking the /Library/Receipts folder on the drive it is told to fix--which means if you've ever tossed stuff out of that folder it won't work right. If you tossed everything from that folder it won't work at all. Don't throw anything away that isn't yours unless you know exactly what it is, what put it there, and why.