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um, bad idea?
Authored by: Krioni on May 31, '05 01:33:19PM

I may be wrong, IANADTE (I Am Not A Disk Technology Export), but I thought that the AppleFree zones were so that if sectors of the disk went bad, the disk could use space from that zone to keep the available disk volume the same. I think that if you delete those and get bad sectors you can lose data.

Anyone actually know more about this? The original poster sounds like he's guessing that they aren't needed.



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Don't partition MacOX drives. No need to.
Authored by: david-bo on Jun 25, '05 11:44:45AM

A separate swap-partition reduces the fragmentation in the system and user parts of the disk. Yes, I know that Mac OS X automatically defragments some files nowadays.

Furthermore, with a separate swap-partition you never risk that a process that has gone crazy fills up the disk so no more swap can be used; it will fill the disk but only the system and/or user-part(ition), at least if you are so disciplined that you never store any documents, applications etc on the swap.

Finally, you can fit a swap-partition to just accomodate the swap files, i.e. if you never user more than, e.g., 4 swap files (64, 64, 128 and 256 MB), you can make the swap 513 MB and you optimize the space usage in the disk. If you just leave the swap on the boot partition, you always have to make sure that the free space is in the order 2^n bytes, if you have 2^1-1 the last swap file can't be created.

Anyway, this hint was not about the existence swap-partitions or not, but rather a hint on how you could save some space on a crowded disk.

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um, bad idea?
Authored by: david-bo on Jun 25, '05 11:53:33AM

It does not work like that. When a sector goes bad it is marked in the file allocation table (FAT) as "don't use". The FAT is stored in a part of the disk you can't access with normal formatting tools, including pdisk.

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