a little help w/firewire drive please

[yellowdog-general@lists.terrasoftsolutions.com]

> 
> From: Clinton MacDonald <clint.macdonald@sbcglobal.net>
> Date: 2004/08/02 Mon PM 02:54:40 CDT
> To: yellowdog-general@lists.terrasoftsolutions.com
> Subject: Re: a little help w/firewire drive please
> 
> Mr. Newsman:

Actually it's Dr. Newsman, but that's another topic.
> 
> newsman@verizon.net wrote:
> > I'd like to have two partitions on the external drive: 1 for
> > OS X and the other for Linux. First question---does it make
> > good sense to make both partitions bootable? I already used
> > Disk Utility in OS X to set up the OS X partition (HFS+). I
> > placed the "free space" partition first and the OS X
> > partition second per the instructions in the YDL installation
> > guide.
> 
> This sounds like a lot of work. What, exactly, are you trying to 
> accomplish? Both Mac OS X and Yellow Dog Linux will recognize HFS, HFS+ 
> (if you are running the correct kernel), and DOS/FAT formatted drives. 
> You might be better off to format the drive in one of those so that you 
> can access it from both YDL and OS X.
> 
> Unless I have misunderstood what you are trying to do.

Basically, I want to use the firewire drive as a backup/storage unit. When 
you install YDL, you first format the OS X partition using OS X disk utility, 
leaving the other partition as "free space" for YDL. You then do the YDL 
install and set up the remaining partition(s) for Linux. That's what I 
thought I should do in this case.

Since I'm only using the firewire drive for storage, it would seem that I do 
not have to worry about making either one or both of the partitions bootable. 
So, again, what specific partitioning tool should I use in YDL to partition 
that part of the firewire drive that is currently sitting there as "free 
space" without wiping out the HFS+ partition that is already there?

Thanks.