[H-GEN] Dual boot MacBook

[Arjen Lentz]

Hi Gavin

----- Original Message -----
> I managed to get a new hard disc for my MacBook, and got it to boot to
> the OS X installer. Just restoring the system from a TimeMachine
> backup now (this is taking 5hrs to restore ~150GB of data... ouch).

Easiest way to upgrade a Mac HD is to swap and attach the old one to an external USB-SATA bracket. You can boot from it by pressing the right key on boot (never remember which but a google search should sort that), copy inside OSX, reboot and bless the new disk, and you're set.
Generally way faster than restores, particularly TimeMachine tends to be slooow.

> Since the new hdd is 500GB, I'm planning to dual boot OS X and Ubuntu.
> I'd like a data partition that both OSes can access. It seems my
> choices are
> 
> * HFS+ with journaling disabled
> * fat32
> 
> Which is the least worst? ;-)
> 
> Any other tips or things too look out for would be appreciated...

I've got my spare MacBook in dualboot and it can access the OSX partition which of course has journaling enabled. Haven't tried writing though (and don't have it handy right now) but it didn't look funny in the mount. Running Ubuntu Maverick (10.10).

Wasn't OSX now able to access ZFS? That might be another option then?


But, as a general hint: dualboots tend to not be. Dualbooted that is. It's annoying to logout and restart. It's ok for transitional but you'll want to make up your mind quickly - it's not productive to keep working switching between the two all the time.

My spare macbook was an experiment; I bought a 128GB SSD and after my move next week I intend to find my external bracket and sort it so the macbook runs only pure Ubuntu on the SSD. It may require a little OSX for rEFIt convenience but I've read that there are alternatives for that also including pure EFI boot for Linux. But we'll see. I don't want to be stuffing around with it for ages.


Cheers,
Arjen.
-- 
Arjen Lentz, Exec.Director @ Open Query (http://openquery.com)
Remote expertise & maintenance for MySQL/MariaDB server environments.

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