I just bought a titanium powerbook with 60 gig hard drive. I want to partition it so that I can run both osx (for general use) and os9.1 (for pro tools le, and other audio apps.)

More specifically, I will need space for approximately this
OS9(Audio)
- Pro Tools LE
- Reason 2.5
- NI Absynth
- NI Pro 52
- 1 or 2 other apps
- A significant amount for audio storage (is 15-20 gigs alot?)

OSX(General)
- a few gigs for applications (games, development tools, etc.)

also
- about 20+ gigs for raw storage (mp3, movies, installers, etc)

I don't know how to partition it though. I was thinking 3 seperate volumes, one for each os and one for raw storage. Don't know if there is a better way though. I have never done this before, so all suggestions are appreciated. Also, is there a way to partition without losing the data I already have accumulated on my drive? or do I need to backup everything. Thanks JOn

Lucky son s.o.b - the TI PB is really cool. ( even PC-mags think so actually )

1st)
I dont really recommend splitting drive into partitions.
My experince as sysadmin (10 years )shows that this usally is not a good idea.

2nd)
Make the partition for audio work the bigger one - say 40 gigs.
( this is no really a lot of space -- 600Mb for 1 hour cd-quality digital audio )

3rd)
The other for OS X & development 20 Gb.

4th)
For raw storage I strongly recommend you to burn CD:s DVD:s or whatever.
( i.e. external storage -- this is close a proper backup scheme )


General thoughts)
You say development in OS X. I dont know what kind of development you mean, software I presume. 20 Gb is NOT a lot space or this kind of work either.
A minimum install of OS X is 1.4Gb - Max install some 2.2 Gb.
A couple of games can easily be another Gb or to, depending on the games of course.

MS-Office and a couple of Adobes programs is another 2Gb.
Are going to develop in Codewarrior? Thats another Gb - depending on install.
Well you get the picture - it real easy to quickly fill those endless vistas of Gb:s with all kinds of
programs and working dokuments.

For what you want to do you can certainly get by for quite a while - how long really depends on
your own personality character. ( are you neat or do you clutter things up )

I dont really recommend that you do software development on the same machine you do audio work either. Webdesign is ok - that just eats Gb on your harddrive.

Real software development of apps can severely affect your system stability if you're messing around with pointers and such. If you manage to introduce Ackerman:s function into your algoritms while developing - you can hog your cpu:s time for all eternity - or until you pull the plug on your TI powerbook.

OK - Thats more than enough for now.
Keep it clean and keep it simple -- good luck: Dixiechicken