InfiniteMac OSx86 - View Single Post

naquaada · 07-17-2008, 01:05 PM

1. Setting up the HD drive

You need a full seperate harddisk for this type of system, not too small. I'm using 320 GB IDE harddisks for booting, IDE is often faster as SATA. I wouldn't recommend IDE harddisks larger as 400GB.

Boot from your favourite installation DVD, select your language and wait until the menu bar is available. Select the Disk Utility in the menu. After it's open and your HD is recognized, click on it and select 'Partition' on the right side. Select your partition map, the most common is MBR. Now choose in 'Volume Scheme' 3 Partitions. You'll get three partitions the same size. Resize the partitions to the following sizes, beginning at the last partition:

3rd partition: 30,90 GB
2nd partition: 15,90 GB
1st partition: The rest of it.

This is for a 320 GB harddisk, on smaller harddisks you can vary the sizes, but don't make them to small. The 2nd partition should be not smaller than 10-12 GB, the third should be at least 20 GB. If you're wondering about this ,90 at the end: On Tiger my second partition was 7,90 GB so that it could fit on a double-layer DVD. For Leopard the partition had to be bigger, but I kept the ,90 at the end. You don't have to do this.

For the names I use for the first partition 'Leopard', for the second 'Recovery' and for the third 'Shared'. I will use these names in the guide from now on. You can change them, but I would recommend not to use Spaces because it's more difficult in use with the Terminal. After you are finished click on 'Apply'. It all went fine you'll get a partition table like this:

I also want to say that you can't partiton the drive earlier from a working OS X system because the Disk Utility works a bit different in the Installation DVD. You'll see this because the partitions have a different size after partitioning. The 2nd partition 'Recovery' will be bumped from 15,90 to 16,03 GB, the 'Shared' partition will be lowered from 30,90 GB to 30,65 GB. Only the main partition 'Leopard' will stay the same size, 251,42 GB on a 320 GB harddisk (which has an effective space of 298,1 GB).

Now reformat the partitions using the security option 'Zero out Data'. This removes all existing data, checks the harddisk and every block of the disk came in touch with the HFS+ file system. This can take a while, so you can do something more important than staring of the blue format process bar ;-)