New iMac

[patrickm]

Well, I did it. Got my new iMac 20" 2.4ghz. Ordered 2 more gigs of ram and an external 500 gig external FW 800 from OWC. Ram and external are being delivered today. Awesome box. Fast. I'm installing windoze also.
I can wait for SD. It's well worth it. Partition the 500 and let SD do it's stuff.

patrickm

[justflybob]

Just out of curiosity...

If you have never used windows on the Mac, then you really have three choices:

1) Bootcamp - using windows as an alternate bootable OS
2) Parallels - emulation sw that let's you dual boot both OSX and windows
3) VMware Fusion - also an emulation sw that let's you dual boot both OSX and windows

I have used all three in a security conscious environment since March of last year. While your experiences or usage requirements may differ from mine, I highly recommend #3 - the VMware Fusion choice.

Bootcamp requires you to boot back and forth
Parallels tech support has been anything but

One last point worth considering regardless of which method you choose. Determine up front what size you think you will need for the windows volume (or partition, if you prefer) - and then double it. One of the more dicey parts of emulation is when find that you are out of disk space on the windows side and need to expand that space, whether as a volume or partition. Others here or elsewhere may disagree, but I speak from experience of having to reinstall dozens of proprietary software titles after having to rebuild the whole mess all over again - just because I underestimated my windows needs.

[patrickm]

I'll probably stick with bootcamp. Emulating tends to decrease speed but how noticeably, I don't know. My reason for installing windoze is just to mess around with. I understand windoze on a intel mac is really fast. I may even do some games but at this point I don't know exactly what I'll be doing with it.
A friend of mine has a imac and he installed windoze. He said that bootcamp would allow only 32 gigs as a partition.
I'm going to partition the 500 gig external to 2 partitions, one at 100 gigs for SuperDuper, the other partition will be used for misc. I went with FW800 so the FW400 would be left open for my Dazzle Hollywood DV-Bridge or anything else requiring FW400.
I'm not quite clear as to how SD will backup my internal drive as far as windoze being duped also.
If in fact SD does back up windoze, then I would have to increase the partition size from 100 gigs to whatever it takes.

patrickm

[dnanian]

We don't back up Windows-formatted volumes.

[patrickm]

That's okay by me. Just less disk space used. Thanks.

[justflybob]

Dave,

Really? I'm rather surprised that SD! doesn't back up Windows volumes, but maybe (once again) I'm in over my head here.

I run VMware Fusion on my MBP 17 w/ 3GB 160GB running 10.5.1
My XP Pro SP2 windows volume resides on my 160GB HFS+ internal drive.

My experience with backups via SD! is that it does, in fact, back up this volume as part of my whole disk backup. Although I must admit, even when I have had to do a restore under Tiger, I did not care in that Windows volume was being SmartUpdated. It mattered to my most that the core volume was restored, so I did not need to reinstall all those apps I mentioned earlier.

So, are talking about the same thing, or did I once again just confuse the issue?

[dnanian]

Yes, it backs up images stored on your regular drive (which are just files). It does not back up separate Windows-formatted partitions or drives.

[justflybob]

Got it. Thanks again.

Best $28 I ever spent, Dave, and I really mean that.

[bucky]

As a point of interest, in Leopard you can alter partition size "on the fly" without erasing or formatting!!!

Regards

Bucky

[justflybob]

Sorry, but if you are talking about a Windows volume, as in VMware Fusion, or Parallels, then that is NOT the case. It's quite a bit trickier than that.

If you are referring to creating a Windows partion, such as when you would use BootCamp? Then perhaps....