partioning power pc and OSX/ubuntu dualboot

[Sebastian M=?ISO-8859-1?B?/A==?=sch]

Hi,

altern wrote:

> hi
> 
> I am reading the "Installation How To - PowerPC" in the Support section
> of ubuntu website.
> in "Partition your disk" it says :
> 
> "If you do not want to erase an entire disk, or if you want to customize
> the partition layout, choose "Manually edit partition table" from the menu"
> 
> what does this exactly mean? will then erase my osx partition and i will
> loose my data?

Yes.

> Or will this create new partitions on the empty space taken from my osx
> partition, (similar to the way SuSE linux does when you intall in over
> winXP), without erasing the osx instalation?.

No.

First make a backup of all your important data, because partition-resizing
may fail and leave your data on a partition unusable.

If xou don't want to loose your data within your OSX-partition you need a
third-party tool like VolumeWorks to resize your OSX-Partition and get some
free space for linux, because parted, the linux tool used for the x86 -
platform, is not capable of resizing HFS+ partitions (there are some patches
for parted, but not very stable).

A short guide on repartitioning:

0. Make a backup of all your important data!
1. Resize your OSX-partition so there's enough space "in front" of the
osx-partition (Use third party-tools like VolumeWorks to do this.)
2. Start the ubuntu-installation and choose "Manually edit partition table".
3. Create at least three partitions:
   - A Apple-BootStrap partition of 1 MB size.
   - A partition for the system (ext3 would be a good choice) with
mountpoint "/"
   - A swap partition. Size is depending on the needed swap, double size of
your RAM will be a good choice.
(Be aware that the Bootstrap partition is "in front" of the ext3 and
swap-partition. You'll need to use trial&error for this, as disk-druid does
strange partition-ordering.)
4. Install ubuntu.
5. Add macosx=/dev/hdxn to the yaboot-conf and update your bootloader, to be
able to boot OSX from within the bootloader (already mentioned in this
list).
6. Update the Wiki documentation with your knowledge, if you got some spare
time ;-)

> if the later is the case, how reliable would this be? i mean paritioning
> is always a delicate process. Is there any recomendations to do before
> doing this? maybe some maintenace tasks on osx that would be helpful?

As already mentioned above you should do a backup first. Further you'll need
to get third-party tools to resize your OSX-partition. Some maintence tasks
like checking the permissions and defragmenting the disk will help to lower
the risk of loosing data ;-)

> THen my second question is:
> I would like to have a partition where i can hold all my data and i
> would like to be able to access (read and write) this partition both
> from Ubuntu and OSX. is this posible? how would i partition my HD to
> achive so?

Both systems (OSX and linux) are capable of read/write the other worlds
Filesystem, so you can access the OSX (HFS+) partition from linux and you
can access your ext2/3 partition from OSX by using ExtFS
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/mac/18619. But be aware that on
both sides write-support is not 100% stable.

> and finally, how difficult is to get a dual boot osx and ubuntu running?

The partitioning is the hardest work ;-)

> I think many of mac users will want to have dualboot and keep osx
> running. In my case i am forced because of my work to use a couple of
> OSX programs that are not and will not be compiled for Linux. So i must
>   have osx and should be able to have access my data folder from both
> systems. Previously i had a machine running SuSe and winXP. From SuSE
> you could access easily the windows partitions (fromated as FAT32) and
> use those files.

Times changes, and so Linux is capable of reading/writing to NTFS and HFS+.
But like others the write-support is not 100%
 
cu
Sebastian

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   .`_`-'_`.     Sebastian Müsch
  :__|\ /|__:      sebastian at sebastian-muesch.de
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