Partitioning a new Intel iMac OSX/Windows/Linux
Archives Forums/MacOS X Discussion/Partitioning a new Intel iMac OSX/Windows/Linux
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| Hi folks. I am excited to announce that I just bought a new Intel iMac 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo, due to arrive next week. :-) The cool thing about these Intel Mac's (or `Mactel's` as they seem to be called) is you can run Windows and Linux natively on the CPU, ie full speed not emulated. Naturally this is a great thing for BlitzMax development because it means that if you put OSX, Windows and Linux onto the hard drive as separately bootable os's you can create BlitzMax applications for all three platforms. I fortunately also have a PPC iMac running OSX Panther which completes the lineup to allow me to create software on all four BlitzMax platforms. This is cool. So, obviously, to prepare the way for installing Windows and Linux in addition to OSX Tiger (at some time in the future) I have to partition the harddrive (160GB) in the correct way so that, when I am ready to, I can install these 3 os's and get them booting. I know the Parallels desktop software is able to boot more than one os simultaneously which is probably cool and I might look into that when the time comes. I'm not ready to put Linux and Windows onto the machine yet, as I don't own them, so I want to go with just OSX Tiger for now, but obviously you have to partition everything ahead of time otherwise when it comes time to install the other 2 os's I would have to wipe out all my OSX data. I'd like to avoid that. I would prefer to partition correctly `up front` and then work off the OSX drive until I'm ready to make the upgrade. Can anyone recommend any websites or instructions for what I should do (with DiskUtil?) to properly partition the harddrive to the correct formats to support the three os's? I am thinking probably like a 80GB OSX partition, a 40GB or 50GB Windows partition and a 30 or 40GB Linux partition. It is possible that the Windows I'll install will be Vista since it's the most up-to-date and XP will have less longevity. Any advice is very much welcome. I'm looking forward to creating software for all these platforms. BlitzMax is cool! |
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| I`ve been looking into this too. So is it possible to run any PC software at full speed then just out of interest? Jason. |
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| Of course. It's an Intel cpu, the software runs natively on the cpu. Windows thinks it is on the C: drive and that it is a totally normal piece of PC hardware. Everything that runs under windows then runs normally. Same for Linux. It seems maybe that 64-bit Vista is not supported yet, though, but the 32-bit version is. ALso it seems if you want to be able to read and write to the windows partition from osx you have to use the FAT32 filesystem for windows which limits the partition to 32gig. Not sure if this is big enough for me, and using the NTFS filesystem prevents writing from osx. At the moment I'm thinking of how to do the partitioning part of things, to get ready for when I'm ready to install. I guess I might be able to go ahead and install Linux off the bat if it's a free one. |
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| Linux is free. You will have problems with 3D support on the iMac, though. If you ordered the 24" iMac, you're quite lucky, because it uses an nVidia chip and nVidia provides drivers for x86 Linux. With ATI, in my experience you're not so well off. However, Sabayon Linux actually ran with an accelerated 3D desktop on my 20" iMac, but not at the full 1680x1050. I only ran it from the live CD and never installed it on my HD and configured it properly, though. I don't care much for Linux, I only "play" with it once in a while out of curiosity. I'm more interested in FreeBSD, but that's a different story. The BootCamp wizard does the partitioning for Windows for you, and I don't think you should partition the disk manually. http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp. Maybe this helps with the triple setup that you want to do: http://wiki.onmac.net/index.php/Triple_Boot_via_BootCamp There are other guides also on the net, but I never tested one myself. Parallels has come a long way and usually does most of the stuff that I need. I have Vista Ultimate 32 Bit installed natively and Half-Life 2 runs great on it. Stalker, however, performs shitty on Vista and I have not (yet) tried anything else. I usually spend my time with OS X on my private machines and only need Windows to play some games that have not yet been ported to the Mac. I even once had Parallels working with a Windows XP BootCamp partition. It does not work with Vista, and when you use XP, you should make sure that it is a volume licence version. The normal OEM version wants to be re-activated (at least my version did that). At work, with a volume license version, I did not have that problem. As for the 32 Gig limitation: BootCamp behaves somewhat inconsistent here. My iMac at work has a 500 GB hard disk built in, and BootCamp actually resized it to two 250 GB partitions of which now Vista occupies one. On my iMac at home with a 250 GB HD, BootCamp only managed to give me a 32 GB partition for Vista. Whenever I tried to assign more than that, the resizing failed with an error message. I never found out why. Anyway, with MacDrive 7 by MediaFour, Vista can fully use all my OS X volumes, so it is not really a problem for me. For what you want to do, you should spend the few extra bucks for Parallels Desktop and MediaFour MacDrive 7. Well, good luck and have some fun with your new machine! :-) |
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| The thing with the 32gig windows partition is if it's a FAT32 partition that's the maximum size and it allows you to read AND write data to/from it from OSX. If you make it larger than 32gig it has to use NTFS filesystem which cannot be written to from OSX. So I guess it's a tradeoff. I am wondering how, if I couldn't write to the windows partition, I'd exchange files between them, perhaps with some online web server thing? I am looking at Kubuntu as the Linux of choice, recommended by a cousin and it seems to be a popular choice for BlitzMax users. I know nothing about Linux at this point. Am wondering how much harddrive space to allocate to these other os's. I am wondering if 32gig would be too little for Windows. I hear Vista uses up at least 15 gig and needs like 5 gig for virtual mem, leaving only 12 for programs/data/development etc (out of 32). As to Linux, not sure how much to allot there. Perhaps just 32 gig would do, so 64gig total, leaving 96gig for OSX which will be my os of choice and most used. |
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| The curious thing about that 32GB problem is that it was the BootCamp disk resizer that simply failed on one machine but worked on the other -- before there even was a chance to chose a filesystem. BootCamp could create a 250 GB partition on the 500 GB HDD, but it failed on the other iMac at creating a 40 GB partition on a 250GB HDD. Well, BootCamp is still beta software, so that could be the reason. If you only need to exchange software between Windows and OS X on the same machine, install MacDrive 7 in Windows and you will be able to read from and write to any HFS+ partition. It should be sufficient to have one OS with full read and write capabilities to the other systems. If you need to exchange data between Linux, OS X and XP/Vista, you need a FAT32 "exchange" partition either on the main hard disk or on a second (external) hard disk. That is the only file system fully supported by all three systems. As for the HD requirements: Vista requires an absolute minimum of 10 GB HD space just for itself - and that is BEFORE you install any updates or "Ultimate Extras". For example, if you download and install all additional language packs for Vista Ultimate, you are getting close to those 15 GB quickly. My Vista installation at home consists of Vista Ultimate plus all downloadable extras, Visual Studio and currently Half Life I (Source), Half Life 2, Half Life 2 Episode 1 and HL 2 Death Match and Lost Coast. Together, that's around 29 GB. The rest is on HFS+ partitions that I access through MacDrive. My Vista installation at work needs around 70 GB: Vista + Office + Visual Studio and a few rather small utilities, that's basically it. So, YES, Vista IS extremely hungry. In comparison, on a 100 GB HDD I can install OS X Tiger, Final Cut Studio (around 25 GB), Propellerhead Reason, iWork, Photoshop CS3, Flash CS3, Flex Builder 2, XCode, Unreal Tournament 2004 (10 GB), all five Apple Jam Packs plus a third party jam pack (around 40 GB) and a few other small applications. Ok, that disk is completely full, but I still have a working system. However, if you will have a similar software setup, you should allocate at least 120 to 160 GB for OS X. I think 100 GB is a bit too tight for either OS X and Windows. Linux is a different story. Since you probably won't be using it as your "bread and butter" system, it can fit very well in a 40 GB partition or VM, I'd say. |
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| Interesting. OSX will be my main partition and o/s of choice, I don't really intend to do a whole of stuff in windows other than using it as a development platform for BlitzMax, for testing software and ensuring cross-platform performance. I don't plan to be installing lots of games and stuff on it, or even tools to make games. Any extra software and tools will be on OSX. I am a little concerned, after what you've said, that Vista eats a lot of space and there wouldn't be very much leeway with 32GB, but then, going for a larger partition would mean not being able to write from OSX. I want OSX to be the main platform and to then copy data to/from the other two. I suppose if that Windows software can see the mac drive I can have windows `read` the OSX data. Can Linux read the Mac partition or would it have to copy from Windows (if it ends up being FAT32)? My drive will be 160GB, which is the largest I've ever owned so far. Considering I used to get by on an Amiga with a 2 GB harddrive with 5 partitions, I'm hoping that 160 will be enough for the three os's. I know also that you probably don't get to access the full 160GB sine some space is used for file management etc. So in that light, a 32GB FAT32 Windows partition and a 32GB Unix Linux partition, leaving around 90GB for OSX, sounds pretty decent to me. Of course it'd be nice to have like 100GB for each, but hey. It's not like I'm trying to have three heavily populated os's with equal amounts of applications on each. I might consider going with, say, 40 or 50GB for windows just because it's hungry, then 30 for Linux and 80 for OSX. Sound reasonable? I don't really want to end up with lots of unused space on Linux and Windows, either, that could be used by OSX. As to versions of Vista, is the bog standard `home` editition (the most basic one) good enough for blitzmax development? |
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| I`ve been looking into this too. So is it possible to run any PC software at full speed then just out of interest? Yes -- except the catch is that many of them (especially the cheapo mac mini's) come with a fairly low-end video card. |
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| I am a little concerned, after what you've said, that Vista eats a lot of space and there wouldn't be very much leeway with 32GB, but then, going for a larger partition would mean not being able to write from OSX You don't have to stick to a single partition of course -- you could allocate one partition for the base OS itself, and make another 'spare' 32GB FAT32 partition for your applications/data/etc. My home PC has a bunch of extra partitions like that: When initially setting it up, I added one partition for windows, one for linux, two spare 32GB primary partitions (Just in case I want to add adidtional operating systems later, it's a royal pain in the neck if you want to do so later and didn't plan ahead). The remaining space is just used for all data. Meanwhile, until I need the two 'spare' partitions, I'm using one for just scrap data: temp files, downloads, etc. Just stuff that can be erased at a moments notice without harm. |
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| To be honest, I don't know if it is still possible to install Vista on a FAT32 partition. I --think-- it only supports its new NTFS version on system partitions, but I can be wrong. www.mediafour.com sells the software that allows Vista and XP to write to OS X partitions. Vista Home Standard should be good enough for BlitzMax development; just make sure that you follow the guides posted in this forum about how to install MinGW. Vista and its new security features are a real bitch. And since you are only going to use Vista Standard: Why don't you just stay with XP? It is faster than Vista and when you install the Microsoft Zune Theme for XP, it even looks like Vista Home Basic... (Vista Home Basic does NOT have the new user interface, only Home Premium and "higher" have it.) Honestly. I have not yet found ONE single reason why somebody should upgrade to Vista. Right now, Vista only makes ones life harder due to all its incompatibilities to existing software, it is slower and I even have seen bluescreens again (not only on Macs, but also on Dells). On XP, bluescreens have become a relict of the past, but on Vista they are ocassionaly fired again. Not very often, but it happens. On Linux, there should be a good chance that HFS+ is supported as a mountable file system. After all, Darwin, the FreeBSD-based foundation of OS X, is open source, so somebody will probably have ported the file system driver to Linux. You can also try and reduce that Linux partition down to 10-15 GB. Since full blown Linux distros can run off a Live CD or DVD, that size should be sufficient for a development Linux system. If you chose XP instead of Vista, you can also go down to 10-15 GB for a dev system. |
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| Looking around on the web a bit there seems to be some free tools that let you read and write to/from the various partitions from within each os. So that frees up the idea of having a 32mb limit and having to use FAT32. I think Windows would be somewhat happer with more space since it is so hungry and bloated, like maybe 50mb would be better. I am happy to put Linux on the drive and have it use maybe 20-30mb. Then the remaining can be osx. One thing to note, to have the 3 os's installed on the same drive based on being compatible with OSX, OSX uses different data types and can only allow 3 partitions on the drive. So there could not be an extra FAT32 partition. There is only room for windows, linux and osx partitions. It's have to be on a separate harddrive. Something I may keep in mind for the future. I think I will go NTFS for windows, and decide later whether it's worth going with Vista. I want it to be vista mainly only because XP will be phased out and Vista is the most up-to-date beast to deal with. Also I think I would aim for the Home Premium edition, which takes a bit more drive space but has aero and various other features. Xlsior, I agree, that's why I tried to avoid the low end `shared memory with motherboard` graphics card systems. That rules out all the mac mini's I think, and also the lowest end iMac. It's only in the 17" 2.0 GHz imac that you begin to get a proper graphics card with dedicated video ram - many times faster than the intel jobby. It also is good enough to support directx9 and shadermodel 2 so vista aero will run on it, plus supports OpenGL 2.0 fully. The ATI Mobility X1600 seems like a pretty reasonable mid-range card for BlitzMax apps - about 2-4 times faster than the GeForce4MX that I have in my current mac. We also just made the switch to wireless. This new computer has bluetooth and 802.11b/g/n so we installed a new router with wireless capability. Our old mac is not wireless but the router has 4 10/100 ports for wired connection. Looking forward to seeing how the new `Bonjour` networking thing turns out on the new imac. I'm also glad to be getting a `mighty mouse` .... includes a 360 degree scroll wheel thing which is also a button, left and right mouse buttons, and an extra two side buttons, and it's wireless. Cool! Been aching for a right mouse button on the mac for ages. |
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| We also just made the switch to wireless. This new computer has bluetooth and 802.11b/g/n so we installed a new router with wireless capability. Our old mac is not wireless but the router has 4 10/100 ports for wired connection. Looking forward to seeing how the new `Bonjour` networking thing turns out on the new imac. In my experience wired still tends to be more stable than wireless -- which is prone to intermittent interference from microwaves, 2.4GHz wireless phone sets, wi-fi networks of your immediate neighbours, etc. (In my basement I can see up to 7 other wifi networks, and all but one of the neighbors are 100-150 feet away from here) So... wifi is great for the laptop, but I'm not going to be switching over the desktops any time soon. |
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| Doesn't matter too much, personally, as the computers are physically next to each other and could easily be wired. Sort of defeats the point of wireless I know but I thought I'd give it a try. |
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| Sort of defeats the point of wireless I know but I thought I'd give it a try. Why broadcast all your data into the ether where it can be sniffed by anyone in a two-block radius? |
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| There is such a thing as security encryption set in the router, plus they have to know the password to access it. |
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| Well, it's here, arrived yesterday. Got it all set up. Pretty nice machine. The responsiveness is good, reminds me of the Amiga, but funny that these days it takes so much horsepower to do that. I partitioned the harddrive with 80GB for OSX, 45GB for Windows and 23GB for Linux. Funny how they advertise the drive as 160GB but really that means 160 billion bytes which is actually only 149 GB. Oh well. ;-) Reinstalled OSX successfully and was thankful that all the bundled software was included on the install disks. Up and running again. Did some updates. Installed BlitzMax for Intel cpu's, updated, sync'd mods, rebuilt all modules, and everything works fine! Compiled some of my Blitz programs, absolutely no problems so far......... except, there is a mouse lag of several frames! I thought that was only a DirectX issue. Anyone know of a reason/solution to that under OpenGL? Anyway, now starts the fun task of installing various other software, such as firefox, gimp, some decent screensavers, decent wallpapers, browser plugins, video players etc. Fun fun fun. |
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| Well, congrats and enjoy!! :-) Videoplayers: VLC for Mac is my standard player for almost everything. You should also install Flip4Mac, a QuickTime plugin that will play wmv files. It also won't hurt to have Divx for Mac installed. I don't like Firefox; even though it is faster than Safari and even though there are a few sites out that there that will work with Firefox but not with Safari, I like Safari better. Buttons in Safari look like real Mac buttons, in Firefox they look like Windows or GTK buttons. But, hey, whatever pleases you. :) Gimp for Mac will require an X11 installation, which is an optional install from the installation DVD. By the way, have you installed Xcode? If you want the latest version, you can download it from the Apple Developer Network (free membership is required). Again, enjoy and have fun! :) |
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| Yeah, I prefer Safari and v 2 is quite a bit faster, tho will have to try firefox as well. Nescape (based on mozilla) is sometimes handy too. I have been using VLC and Flip and DivX so will make sure to reinstall those. Also X11 was automatically installed as part of the standard os. I only had to install xcode 2 prior to installing blitzmax. It also came with iLife and some other stuff. I did join the ADC or ADN or whatever, so will check into that. Any idea about the mouse lag? |
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| There is such a thing as security encryption set in the router, plus they have to know the password to access it. Depends. WPA maybe, but plain WEP is supposedly trivial to break these days. |
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| I am thinking to also activate the MAC address screening, whereby you enter into the router the MAC addresses for the computers allowed to access it, and then it allows only those computers to connect. Might help a bit. I'm not going to get paranoid about it. |
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| ImaginaryHuman, did you manage to get your AirPort connection working under Linux? I've just recently installed a new 250G HDD in my MacBook Pro and configured it for triple-boot (Tiger, Ubuntu, XP Home). All three OSes boot and work fine, but I just can't get my wi-fi internet connection working under Linux. Just wondering which driver you actually used, and whether you encountered any problems? |
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| Wifi is a pain occasionally in linux (was the only real pain i experienced with it). It helps if you know the make, model and (more importantly) the chipset of the wifi device. On the Ubuntu forum (somwhere) there is a big chart of known wifi products and wether they: just work, work with some poking or are a dead loss. I would have thought (as apple standardise everything) that whatever it has got should be covered somehow. |
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| Damn straight, I had Yellow Dog installed on my old PPC mac too and the only reason I didn't use it was I could never get the blasted AirPort working on that either, or the modem! So no internet at all. I'll just have to do some more googling and have another crack at it, I suppose. |
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| I haven't installed Linux yet but will let you know when I do. |
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| I haven't installed Linux yet but will let you know when I do. |
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