Newbie q.s re Spotlight, partitioning
 

I've just acquired SD! to help me exploit a new 320gb disk which I plan to put in my MacBook Pro to replace its 160gb drive.
My plan is to split the 320gb drive into 2 160 gb partitions.
The 160gb boot partition of the new drive will be cloned to the 160gb original drive in an FW800 external casing (and thus provide emergency bootable backup).

(The other partition will be backed up to a network drive)

Question 1: Is this a good plan?

I've started by using SD! to make a bootable copy of the 160GB internal drive on a partition of the new drive.
Although the copy was very slow I can boot just fine from the copy (on the new drive currently in the external housing).

I have now disabled spotlight indexing of the copy.
When I first booted off the internal drive with the copy mounted, spotlight tried to index it; but after about 90 minutes Spotlight still said it was "estimating the time to create an index".

Question 2: Is it normal for Spotlight to take so long before actually starting to create the index? Or could that be symptomatic of another problem?


Thanks..

I don't know why you'd want to partition your internal drive, but that's your choice...

Anyway, Spotlight does what spotlight does. Hard to know why sometimes, but I don't think there's any particular problem...