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I tried to update Mac OS X to version 10.1.4 last night - and ran
into the same problem I had with one of the earlier updates.
The problem.
Apple claims that you can run Mac OS X on a 1.5 GB
partition.
The updaters requires 300 MB of free space.
If you have a small OS X partition, you may not have 300 MB
available.
Mac OS X will generate an error report if you don't have 300 MB for
it to use.
Mac OS X won't tell you how much free space your partition
has.
When I got my TiBook over a year ago, I
created a 2 GB partition to hold a spare copy of OS 9 plus
utilities - and OS X when I would get around to it. I pretty much
had to clear everything off that partition when I installed OS X,
but I didn't want to put it on my main (8 GB) partition until I
was sure everything worked and I was ready to adopt OS X.
That 2 GB partition has 227 MB of free space - after moving several
X apps to my main partition. I don't think I should have to move Mail
and Internet Explorer, apps that came with OS X, to another
partition just so I can install a software update.
Apple needs to address this. Maybe they can change things so the
updater puts the temporary files on another partition if there's
insufficient space on the current partition - with the user's
permission, of course. Maybe they can rewrite the updater to actually
tell the user how much more space it needs. Maybe they can teach
OS X to report how much free space exists on a drive.
If any of these are part of X, I've never heard of it, but I somehow
can't imagine that X is unable to know and display the amount of free
space on a drive.
With the classic Mac OS, I could simply copy everything to a larger
partition, boot from it, and be on my way (well, a few prefs might need
to be tweaked). But I don't know if you can do that under
OS X.
To top it off, my main partition only has 1.45 GB free and my X
Drive has 1.77 GB on it. I guess I could move some files to the
OS X partition - but that's nearly full, which is the cause of all
this trouble.
The alternative is to move everything to an external FireWire
drive, repartition my 10 GB hard drive into 7.5 and 2.5 GB pieces, put
everything back, and hope OS X survives being moved around like
that. Either that or make a larger main partition and combine OS 9
and X on the same partition. I don't want to buy a larger hard drive,
nor do I see any reason to do so. 10 GB is adequate for my needs; I
just have the wrong partition setup at present.
I'm researching on the Web. Is it possible to simply copy OS X
to another drive and boot from it? How easy or difficult is it to
combine an OS X partition and an OS 9 partition? If I have
both on one partition, will Retrospect Client and other utilities stop
working?
As always, Mac OS X is a learning experience.
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