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Why?
Authored by: DavidRavenMoon on Nov 30, '04 12:44:26PM
I'm relatively new to OSX, so forgive my ignorance...do partitions show up on the desktop as separate drives, or aren't they mounted as part of the filesystem? When I think of multiple partitions in a Unix environment, I'm thinking of /usr/local or /home being mounted via NFS, in which case the directories are mounted to the root tree, anyway.

Aside from that, if they do show up as separate drives, how is that different from just having an alias to your data folders?

On a Mac, either running OS X or OS 9 and earlier, partitions show up as separate drives, or more correctly separate volumes, since Mac OS doesn't show the drive, just the volume, i.e. you see a CD, but not the CD drive.

To answer the second question, I used to partition my disks, but after a while I always found I needed more room on one partition, and less on an other, and so on, so I have stopped partitioning drives at all.

While is it helpful from a maintenance point of view, I haven't had a need for it. I just boot my Mac from a custom made BootCD with both DiskWarrior and Drive 10. I think booting from a partition on the same hard drive that contains your main boot partition to fix that drive is not a great idea, since you are still on the same physical hard drive.


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G4/466, 1 GB, Mac OS X 10.3.6

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