Boot Camp Partition Question

Welcome to the Forums!

Bootcamp partitions cannot be resized without wiping the drive. So, I'd recommend that you choose carefully and plan well 😉 (There are 3rd party utilities that can resize partitions on the fly, but they dont' work with Bootcamp partitions.)

Main factor is where you will keep your 'other' media (e.g. if you have music/photo libraries, and will keep those on the Mac side, you may want to reverse the sizes you are proposing.

Just my $0.02.

You might have a look around the Boot Camp Forum.

Folk, use Disk Utility, look it up on the internet (how to resize and not lose data), I have done it plenty of times, it does depend on certain factors (type of partition table, file system, etc.)

It's a bit straightforward after you have done it once 🙂

Not very much. The full install of the Mac OS is ~12 GB (or a little less), FCP2 apps only take up ~4 GB. All of the optional FCP2 installs (templates, etc.) are another 55 GB - those can all go on the external.

I was talking more about personal items (I don't consider my iTunes/iPhoto libraries to be that large, and they total ~16 GB.

Also, you'll need adequate space for FCP2 current projects if you plan to take advantage of the portability of a notebook.

drdimento,

It depends a great deal on how you will be using the computer most of the time. Seems to me, the point of getting a Mac is to run OS X. If you are anything like 90% of users, new or not, you will spend most of your time in OS X, and only boot into Windows when you absolutely must.

If you haven't spent any real time in OS X, you won't have any idea what I talking about. Perhaps this story will offer some help in this regard:

My sister, a professional photographer, always used Windows. I tried for years to convince her that she should switch to a Mac, but she's hard-headed ("why would I want a stupid Mac???"). About 1 year ago, she called me, having finally gotten completely frustrated with having to deal with Windows problems. She was on her way to an Apple store, and had a raft of questions about what she would need in order to migrate some of her photography work to OS X.

At the time, I told her that she might need Aperture and perhaps Photoshop, and that she could install Windows in Bootcamp in order to continue using any of her current software that required Windows. She purchased an iMac, and a retail copy of Vista.

She got the computer set up at home, but ended up never installing Windows. She immediately cut her turn-around time for photo shoots in half, and she has never looked back. Unlike her "geek" brother, she isn't particularly fond of computers in general, but she loves her Mac, and she was one of the first to purchase an iPhone (this is one case where Apple's "halo effect" has worked in reverse).

If your experience ends up being anything like hers, you are going to want as little to do with Windows as possible. In other words, you'll want to leave as much room for OS X as you can, and only leave the bare minimum for your Bootcamp partition.

Some examples: While you will want your "media" on an external drive, you're going to want your music in iTunes. This means importing it into OS X, and onto the Mac portion of the internal hard drive. The same will hold true for many of your images, only into iPhoto. And, the more you use OS X, the more you're going to want your "stuff" immediately available in it.

Scott

Good story, Scott.

I too, am a "switcher". Of course, I didn't need any convincing. Once I saw how beautiful and elegant the Mac OS X interface was (back in the Jaguar days) I knew that I wanted a mac. When I began using my first mac back in 2003 I, too, was hooked. I began looking into all of Apple's product lines and now I own many different Apple products:

Powerbook G4 12" 1GHz DVI (Sold)
Airport Express (b/g) x 2
Mac Mini Core Duo 1.6 GHz
iPod Nano (1st Gen)
iPod Nano (3rd Gen)
iPhone
Apple TV
Macbook Pro 17" 2.4 GHz.

Keeping this post relevant to the thread, I currently have my MBP set up with a 110GB OS X partition and a 32GB XP partition. There are still a couple old windows games that I want to play that were only made for PC. (Baldies and Theme Hospital) Also, currently the only way to enjoy Instant Watch from Netflix is to have Windows XP or Vista, IE 6 or 7 and WMP 11. Everything else I do on the Mac side.

I have set my Windows XP partition to 40 GB, which should be good enough for Windows 7 in the future.

However, I store all of my files on my Mac OS partition, which I access and use in Windows via Mac Drive 7 ( http://www.mediafour.com).



Check out the following link too for more tips.

http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=7672300#7672300

Make sure that after creating the XP partition using the boot camp assistant, when you are installing XP (blue DOS installer screen) that you do not choose the option that says "Leave the file system intact" You will need to re-format it at as FAT32 even though it apears to already be in FAT32 format. Quick format worked for me.

drdimento,

OK, I think I have the general picture now.

Avid, huh? Well, then you will want to give plenty of space to Windows. This drops a bit of a conundrum right into your lap, with a portable (given the fact that portables have smaller hard drive capacities than their desktop counterparts).

First, I will confirm that you'll be able to re-size the OS X partition as needed. This will, of course, require that the Windows partition be completely removed (the Bootcamp Assistant is the tool to handle this). This means that you'll need a good utility for backing up that Windows installation, but I assume that you already have such a solution in place now. When the time comes to "whittle down" your Windows installation, you'll remove as much data and software as you're able, reducing the size of that installation in the process, then make a full backup. The Bootcamp Assistant (an OS X utility that lives in your OS X "Utilities" folder) will then delete the Windows partition, returning all of the now free space to your OS X partition. You can then use the Bootcamp Assistant to create a new, smaller Windows Partition, and the Windows backup can be used to recover.

So the only question is, "where to start?" I think you need to approach this from the Windows side, first. How small a partition can you get away with using for Windows? Since you have no option but to use Windows extensively for at least a while, you want/need to be comfortable there. Once you make this determination, see where that puts you as far as the OS X partition goes.

Your immediate willingness to use external storage extensively is going to be key to your success here (but then, you're doing video; of course you know the value of external storage!). Based on the use of copious external storage, and given your intended OS X usage (Garageband and FC in particular), I think you can get away with 60 or so GBs for OS X. I think 50 GBs will be about the minimum, and as much as 90 would be nice. 60, however, should give you enough room to move around for a good while.

Scott

Double post

drdimento,

1. While partitions can be changed later it might be favorable not to do so to avoid putting one's data at risk (espcially for those of us who avoid the "pucker" zone) and thus, one should chose the partition "quantity" wisely in the beginning.

Well, I am going to recommend that you use Time Machine. Doing so will require a bit more of that external storage, but it will entirely remove the "pucker factor" that might otherwise be involved in re-sizing partitions. Trust me, Time Machine rocks (I recently formatted my internal drive, then restored from TM; I was able to restore my 100 GB+ installation of OS X in about 45 minutes, using a Firewire 800 external)! I've had great success dynamically re-sizing partitions without affecting my OS X installation, but having a good Time Machine backup makes the possibility of even a catastrophic failure in this regard... no big deal.

2. It appears FCP projects can be stored on an external drive without having to save space for FCP projects; and, FCP Suite 2 consumes approximately 45 to 47 Gb of space including its' templates and additional materials.

All true, but those "templates and additional materials" can be, and often are, stored on an external. That's what I recommend you do. In fact, I believe that most video pros who happen to be using a portable store those files externally.

3. The OS X Leporad uses about 22 Gb of space.

The what??? (LOL) Leopard can be squeezed into 22 GBs, but it's not pretty. If I am not mistaken, just Garageband (along with its "additional" files) consumes something over 7 GBs. See my last post.

4. Mac and Windows files can be transferred across the platform via the external FAT32 drive(s) and while USB 2.0 will work favorably for FCP and Garage Band files, the preferrable drive would be a IEEE1394-800.

As others have already stated, your best bet might be Macfuse and/or Macdrive (within OS X and Windows, respectively). HFS+ (the native Mac OS format) is, without doubt, the best format for storage of your media files. My only concern would be its compatibility, even if you use Macdrive in Windows, with Avid. You might want to look into this on both the Avid and Macdrive support sites.

Barring the workability of HFS+ and something like Macdrive, or sticking with NTFS and using Macfuse to be able to write to that format in OS X (OS X will read NTFS, but cannot natively write to it), FAT-32 is the only option for bi-directional portability. The biggest drawback to using FAT-32 is that it has an inherent 4 GB file size limit.

I have had a look at your "profile" for the forums, and it does appear that you aren't just a "hobbyist," but will be using this machine in a serious way. I know that you are "portable shopping" right now, but have you considered that what you really need is a Mac Pro?

Scott