Partitioning of HD Question -OS X vs OS 9

Dave K · Dec 27th, 2002, 07:54 AM

New to Mac, and I posted similar question in Town Hall, but it was suggested I might get more technical help here.

Just purchased a used B&W 450 with 40G HDD, burner, 512RAM, Radeon 32M video, OS X, for my teenage daughter who wants to do video editing with i-Movie. When she is using this program she gets message fairly soon indicating there is no HD space.

When I go to the disk utility it shows I have a total of 37.27G available. The HDD is partitioned with 8.98G for OS X, but only 1.28G is free. For the OS 9 partition there is 28.37G capacity and 27.27G is available. It looks like you can move a slider to change the ratio of HD space available for each partition, however it is locked, and it asks for your administrator password.

1) Assuming most programs will run under OS X versus OS 9 - should the % of HD space allocated to OX not be much higher? What is the proper % (50%, 75%?)

2) Is it as easy as getting the admin password, and moving the slider to allocate more HD space to OS X? Or is there some way to tell i-Movie to use the OS 9 partion space to save data to?

Thanks

Rob · Dec 27th, 2002, 08:43 AM

Changing your partition size isn't a safe solution unless you are willing to back up everything and reformat your drive (not fun).
It sounds like you already have a good setup anyway. The partition names you have don't mean anything to the operating system. You can store OS X files and programs on your OS 9 partition without causing any problems. The partition names just make it easier for you to remember where things are "usually" stored.
The only things you should not move from your OS X partition are the original OS X installation files. This takes up about 2Gig or less. If you move those files then you might have problems the next time you upgrade the OS.
My guess is that you have created some iMovies and have them stored on your OS X partition. These tend to be big files and will gobble up a big chunk of your drive space.
Create a new folder on your OS 9 partition called "My iMovies" and copy your movies into this folder. Make sure they work in this new location and then you can delete them from your OS X partition.

Dave K · Dec 27th, 2002, 10:18 AM

I moved the movie clip file fro OS X to the OS 9 partition. If I click on this file now and open it up in i-Movie, it shows 27G available free space.
So if I continue working /adding to this clip there is lots of HD space.

However when I open up i-Movie to start a NEW project it shows 1.3G HD space available - ie. the free space on the X partition of the HDD. How do you set it to use the OS 9 partiton available space?
I assume it defaults to the OS X partition space, since i-Movie is running in the OS X side of the partition.

Rob · Dec 27th, 2002, 12:14 PM

I don't use iMovie but I just tried it to see what would happen. When you start a new project there is a line for selecting the name and a second line for selecting the location. It defaults to the Documents folder. You can change this to another folder on the OS 9 partition.
It doesn't look like iMovie gives you any such options in the preferences to automatically store to another partition.
My guess is that if you start a new movie and save it to a folder on your OS 9 partition that iMovie will remember that for the next time you want to create a new one. If not, then you will have to remember to do it each time you create a new movie.