Hd Upgrade / Relocating Application Folder to 2nd Drive

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rweissman

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I want to run OSX10.4 from a 74GB Raptor. I have multiple, higher capacity SATA drives for my 2.5Mhz G5 (8GB mem).

Currently, my boot drive has more than 130MB of stuff, mostly apps. My understanding is that Apple wants everything important, like apps, on the boot drive.

How do I configure my system so that just the OS and a swap file and a few, high perf. applications (FCPro HD Production Suite, Adobe CS2) run on the Raptor (since it has little space) and everything else (libraries, other apps) run off a 2nd or 3rd SATA drive? (I've installed an expansion kit and can have 5 internal SATA drives).

Must the boot drive contain all apps and related files?


Other ideas as to how to configure for fastest performance? Other SATA drives are a 250 and 300 Maxline and the original 160BM seagate (slow) that came OEM'd with the G5.
 
Hm, I must confess that I never thought about or tried to relocate the Apps folder, but thinking about it...

I think you could try to just copy the folder to your desired location, create an alias of the folder in the new place and place it where the original folder was. Basically, I think this should work. You still have an instance of the application folder on your boot disk, but all the space is used on another HDD. As I said, this should work in theory, but I have not tried.

Keep in mind though that the Library and Application Support files still reside on the startup disk. I don't know if it would be a good idea to relocate them. But if you want to, you could try the same approach as above
 
This sounds like sage advice. I don't know why I didn't think of aliasing the folder...

I am about 3,000 miles from the G5 so will try this this weekend. But one query: some apps look for the apps folder and will only install on a boot drive. I wonder what they'll do with the alias (but will try it this weekend).
 
Sounds dangerous to me...

If you ARE going to try this, I highly reccomend you make a unix symbolic link rather than a Finder alias. Otherwise command line programs will get stuck...
 
Has anyone gone any further with this, since August?

I'm currently "playing" with this, using a scratch version of Jaguar on an old Wallstreet, just to be safe!

I've made the symbolic link approach work, in the sense that the relocated apps all seem to function correctly, as far as I've tested them (which was by no means exhaustive testing!). I've even found that SOME app installers WILL interpret the symbolic link and install into the relocated directory.

BUT, other installers (notably the COmbo 10.2.8 updater, which also includes both new apps and updates for existing apps) actually tramples all over the symbolic link, by re-creating the /Applications directory in root!

At this point, I'm thinking that the locations of the 'standard" directories - /Applications, /Users - must obviously be defined somewhere. Most likely place is in some data table within the Finder perhaps, but I haven't yet got to looking for it.

Just thought I'd mention this here, to find out if anyone else has had the same thought and, if so, whether nor not they got any further than I have so far!

The motive for me, for doing this, is that on older Macs like my Wallstreet, into which I've installed a 100 Gbyte disk, one is obliged to restrict the root partition to less than 8 Gbytes. (In practice, I found that the installer wouldn't accept a first partition of 7.5 Gbytes, and I had to go back and reduce it even further to 7.0 Gbytes before it would let me install the system. This is no doubt due to the fact that the "8 Gbytes" is merely a rule of thumb, the actual limit being something to do with the maximum number of cylinders on the disk drive, IIRC, so it is dependent on the actual drive hardware as to how many Gbytes that works out to be!)

Anyway, given that small limit, one clearly would find advantages from being able to move both /Applications and /Users to other partitions of their own, in the latter case making the backup of user data rather simpler as well!

That's all for now - back later.....

Nigel
 
**If you brake your mac doing this, its not my fault!**
before i got my g4, i had a ppc8600 running 10.2. i had a 40gig drive on an ide card, but no amount of resizing would let me install it on that drive. so i had to use the biggest scsi drive i had, 3gig. after getting the os installed. i created another account, the one i would use as the main account. i then logged in as root, and launched NetInfo Manager ( i think its called, i'm not in front of a mac right now.) in the utilities folder. in here you can find the user and make some changes if you know what you are doing. i found the other account i made, and changed it's location to the 40gig hd. then logged in to that account, and presto, my user account was on the bigger hd, which is good for iphoto and itunes. as far as the apps went, you may be able to use the same utility to change that location, i don't know, i never looked. what i did was left the apps that insisted on being on the boot drive alone, and made a new app folder on the bigger drive, and installed the apps that would let there, and made alias' of the apple apps in that folder and moved it to the shortcut bar so that when i selected apps in the finder windows it took me to the folder on the bigger drive. good luck and hope this helps. if you need more info, let me know and i'll try to help when i'm in front of a mac.
 
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