/Users on another partition [was Re: Mac Mini]

[Jurvis LaSalle]

On Jan 20, 2005, at 2:07 AM, Thierry de Coulon wrote:
> The main problem is that Apple's developers don't understand (or use) 
> OS X
> "unix" capabilities, so everything is supposed to happen in one, big
> partition - you can't tell iMovie to allways use a specific directory, 
> or
> iDVD that it should create it's DVD image on an external hard disk. I 
> never
> found a hint how to tell OS X I would like to put the "users" 
> directory on
> another partition....
You probably didn't look hard either...  but since I'm procrastinating 
anyway-
let me hold your hand for a bit ;-D

<xterm>
[2-lasalle at aradorns-laptop)~%
       =>uname -a
Darwin aradorns-laptop.local 7.7.0 Darwin Kernel Version 7.7.0: Sun Nov 
  7 16:06:51 PST 2004; root:xnu/xnu-517.9.5.obj~1/RELEASE_PPC  Power 
Macintosh powerpc

[3-lasalle at aradorns-laptop)~%
       =>cat /etc/fstab
/dev/disk0s3 /Users hfs rw 0 2

[4-lasalle at aradorns-laptop)~%
       =>sudo pdisk /dev/disk0 -dump
/dev/disk0  map block size=512
    #:                 type name                  length   base      ( 
size )
    1:  Apple_partition_map Apple                     63 @ 1
    2:            Apple_HFS Panther             25165824 @ 64        ( 
12.0G)
    3:            Apple_HFS Users               58720256 @ 25165888  ( 
28.0G)
    4:      Apple_Bootstrap untitled                2048 @ 83886144  (  
1.0M)
    5:      Apple_UNIX_SVR2 YDL3.0.1            12288000 @ 83888192  (  
5.9G)
    6:      Apple_UNIX_SVR2 boot                  153600 @ 96176192  ( 
75.0M)
    7:      Apple_UNIX_SVR2 YDL4                 8192000 @ 96329792  (  
3.9G)
    8:      Apple_UNIX_SVR2 swap                 5242880 @ 104521792 (  
2.5G)
    9:      Apple_UNIX_SVR2 gentoo               7445568 @ 109764672 (  
3.6G)

Device block size=512, Number of Blocks=117210240
DeviceType=0x0, DeviceId=0x0
</xterm>

I use a typical *nix /etc/fstab constructed from info found with pdisk 
and load it in NetInfo with the following command (this only has to be 
done once):

	sudo niload -m fstab / < /etc/fstab

Some say that my internal hard drive won't always be detected as disk0. 
  I've yet to get smacked with that problem probably because this is a 
laptop and I rarely have other disks attached besides a cd/dvd.  YMMV.  
I'm really starting to wish that I had gone with the 80GB drive 
instead, then I could fit some more BSDs in or even give a nameless 
distro a slice :-D (not to mention more rpms|faster access|hotter lap).

As to your first lament, I also often wonder why OS X doesn't partition 
itself at all.  Cutting off a data partition like /Users makes upgrades 
and
reinstalls much easier and faster to perform (I also install all 
non-default OS X apps on the /Users partition to facilitate the 
process).  Of course, Apple is all about keeping it simple.  
Partitioning is drastically different depending on your needs and 
computer literacy.  Explaining to someone that he shouldn't have put 
all his junk on his OS partition can be conceptually much tougher than 
pointing it out when his whole hard drive is full.  I doubt Apple will 
ever partition a default install without some drastic change to their 
hardware (say maybe new G5's that support CPU partitioning and have 
some über-LVM disk i/o daemon running in the HyperVisor automatically 
allocating disk according to the needs of various partitions).  Who 
knows though- I can remember the days when RAM had to be doled out much 
like these partitions...

Jurvis LaSalle