Sub Rosa Volume Works

Sun Jun 20 05:55:02 2004

Dear YDL friends

Dynamically resizing OSX partitions sounded too good to be true,

http://www.subrosasoft.com/thestore/product_info.php?cPath=88&products_id=431

but I paid up 50$ to give it a spin, and at the same time to put
YDL 3.0.1 back inside my white iBook2 14in (it got wiped out when the
dreaded iBook motherboard bug hit me). Of course I made a back-up first:
I used Carbon Copy Cloner

http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html

to make a bootable copy of my single partition OS X internal hard disk
on an external Firewire hard disk (LaCie). I find that CCC often stalls
part way through the cloning, but you can just quit, and restart at the
point where it left off. It seems to be a bug in the LaCie drive's
driver. It helps to use ProcessWizard

http://www.lachoseinteractive.net/en/products/processwizard/

to give CCC maximum priority over other processes running at the same time.

I rebooted OS X from Firewire and used VolumeWorks to shrink the OS X
partition on the internal hard drive. It seemed to work fine, but
afterwards, I could not reboot from the hardisk!!!

In fact I could not even remount the internal hard disk, when booted
from firewire: I got an error message about an incorrect block count!!!!
So I wiped the whole thing clean, created new partitions on
the hard drive, and used CCC to put my system back in place on the iBook,
cursing silently...

Installing YDL was uneventful and swift. It does help to know that
anaconda can't figure out by itself what kind of monitor the iBook has.
You have to point it to apple -> ibook2 12, by hand. This is pretty
amazing when you are used to soporifically uneventful Fedora or Redhat
installations on intel, where I never have to tell anaconda anything
about the hardware at all (but maybe I was just lucky).

Choosing which apps to install, I do as follows. I ask for a custom install
and then ask for the standard collection for each and every group of
applications, including all the developer groups. But I skip all the server
stuff. What I want is a kind of extended workstation. At the end I check
that latex and associated tools have all been included too, since that is
the main thing I use in my work.

I have the OS X application ext2fsx so that I can mount ext3 partitions
from OS X:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsx/

It was even possible after that to rename the yellowdog
root partition from "/" to something more appealing, from
the OS X commandline.

There is an option in ext2fsx to make an ext3 partition invisible.
I discovered however that when you have done that, you cannot
mount the partition again from the ext2fsx application! Fortunately
you can do it from the command line. One should read the "Readme"
carefully which comes with ext2fsx.

Richard

http://www.math.uu.nl/people/gill