Using external hard drive as both a boot drive and time machine backup

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Level 3

531 points

Using external hard drive as both a boot drive and time machine backup

My internal 1TB hard drive on my iMac is dead and I don't have the money to replace it at the moment.

I have everything backed up on an external 1TB drive using Time Machine. As a workaround for the time being,

Is there any way I can install the system on the external drive and use that as the boot drive without erasing the Time Machine

Backups? It seems to me I would have to have two partitions for the external drive, one for the system, and

one for Time Machine. But is there any way to add a partition without erasing the existing one with

Time Machine only on it?

Sorry if line breaks here are weird. Doing this from iPhone.

Posted on Mar 8, 2012 5:22 PM

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Answer 1

Niel

Level 10

726,821 points

Mar 8, 2012 5:23 PM in response to Jeff Friedman

Use the Disk Utility to partition it. Having your backups on the same drive as the original data won't help when that drive fails.

(64658)

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Answer 2

IMAC47

Level 1

7 points

Mar 8, 2012 5:41 PM in response to Niel

Neil , I have a mid 2010 27" imac running 10.6.8 and i want to install Lion , when i purchase Lion from app store will it give me any install options as I would like to be able to dual boot using SL and Lion , I have 500 gigs left on my 1 tb drive (should I do this) or would I be better of using an external bootable drive as I also want to use Ubuntu and or Linux down the line.

Any and all support , help and advice will be appreciated.

If you would like to e-mail me you can find it on my profile page.

Thanks

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