new MacBook, no FireWire

[chris_johnsen]

Originally Posted by mkraft

I don't recall seeing (in the SD user guide) any requirement that USB drives be partitioned to use SuperDuper!

I thought that was only an issue if the user wants the backup to share the drive with other files (?)

What does "properly partitioned" mean exactly?

Thanks.

All disks should be partitioned, this is not a requirement from SD!, it is just the way disks are generally managed on all operating systems these days. Completely unpartitioned disks are usually supported, but such usage is very rare for data disks and extremely rare for startup disks. Being partitioned does not imply that there must be more than one volume created from a single physical disk. A disk can be 'partitioned' into one volume (even though the normal English meaning of to partition is “to divide into multiple parts”). Usually a new Mac will come with its drive partitioned under the GPT (GUID Partition Table) scheme into a single volume that spans (nearly) the entire disk.

Partitioning a disk into multiple volumes is one way to store both a system backup and other files (or more than one backup, etc.) on the same drive. Another way is to make backups to disk image files that are stored alongside other files.

By "properly partitioned", I suspect that he means that Intel Macs need GPT to be bootable and PPC Macs need APM (Apple Partition Map) to be bootable.

Many external drives come partitioned in the MBR (Master Boot Record) style with a FAT-variant filesystem because that is a partitioning scheme and filesystem combination that just about every operating system understands (Windows, Macs, other UNIX and UNIX-like systems, etc.). Just because an OS can read a volume does not mean that the underling hardware+firmware can boot from the volume.

I suspect that SD! will backup to/from any volume that is formatted as HFS+ (even one on an MBR partitioned disk). But the target volume will likely only be bootable if the disk is partitioned with the scheme that the hardware requires (this is because the BIOS/OpenFirmware/EFI usually only looks in one partition-scheme-dependent place for booting information).