In Partition Information, give your new partition a name. To create a new partition, click the Plus key at the bottom left of the Partition Layout.Ĭlick inside the new partition to select it. If Partition doesn’t appear, you’ve selected the wrong thing in the left-hand panel. Once the hard disk is selected, click the Partition button at the top center of Disk Utility. The key is to select the drive that contains the Macintosh HD partition. NOTE: The name of your hard disk – which will probably be a gibberish of letters and numbers – will vary. You can’t partition a partition, you can only partition the hard disk that contains the partition. Select the text ABOVE the words “Macintosh HD.” This is because “Macintosh HD” is already a partition. To create a partition, open Utilities > Disk Utility. While partitioning the boot drive still makes sense, partitioning for data storage does not. This is no longer a good idea, because there’s a performance hit in moving between different partitions. NOTE: In the past, we would partition drives to organize our files. So, partitioning allows you to create multiple rooms, but it doesn’t expand the total storage space available to you. The only problem is that all these different rooms must fit into the space of the original house. Partitioning allows us to create multiple rooms. Right now, your “house” stores all your files in a single room filled with file cabinets.) (You can think of hard disk partitions as similar to rooms in a house. Your numbers will vary, but this is how you calculate the partition size you need.Īs shipped by Apple, your boot disk has a single partition. The size partition you need to create is the sum of these three folders: 25 + 20 + 10, or 50 GB. In this example, I’m using 3 GB for all my Home directory files. (It has an icon of a house.)Īgain, choose File > Get Info and write down the size. Again, let’s round this up to 20 GB.įinally, open the boot disk, twirl down Users and select your Home directory. For this system, applications take 15 GB. The total storage space required for all your applications is listed in the top right corner. Open your boot disk, select the Applications folder and choose File > Get Info. So, let’s estimate the OS at 25 GB, to be safe. Most Mac operating systems take 20 GB or less to store. Though we use the term “dual-boot,” in point of fact you are only limited by the amount of free space on your boot disk.īefore we create a new partition, we need to figure out how big it needs to be. NOTE: Actually, you can create any number of different boot disks, to run whatever software you want. Because all of my media and projects are stored on an external drive, dual-booting allows me to select which version of Final Cut Pro X I want to use for an edit. However, for me, a big benefit of creating a dual-boot system is that I can have two different Mac OS X systems, with two different versions of Final Cut Pro X, installed. NOTE: While dual-boot systems allow you to choose which operating system you will run, you can’t switch between operating systems without restarting your computer. The most common reason to do this is to have both Mac OS X and Windows available on the same system. While accurate for earlier operating systems, here’s a more recent version that also includes a note on APFS.ĭual-boot systems are a way of configuring the boot drive so that you have the option to start-up your computer (“boot”) into different operating systems. To know whether you are in the safe mode or not, open System Information and look next to System Software Overview – Boot Mode.NOTE: This article was first published in 2013. To go into Safe Mode, restart your Mac and hold Shift as soon as you hear the startup chime, keep holding the button until the gray progress bar appears under the Apple logo. You can use this mode to narrow down potential cause of software issues and conflicts. Load the Bare Essential with Safe Modeīy booting into Safe Mode, your system will load only the bare minimum drivers and softwares to keep it running. Then use the mouse or arrow keys and Enter to pick one of the drives.Ĥ. To access Startup Manager, restart your Mac and hold down the Option key when you hear the startup chime. It’s useful in several situations, such as your system has multiple drives, and you want to boot into one of them, you want to boot into Windows using Boot Camp, you want to boot from an external drive, or you want to install/reinstall OS X using Installation Disk. Startup Manager is a way to access different drive to boot your system. Use Startup Manager to Choose a Boot Drive
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