Mac OS X filesystem setup

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mth71

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I have my Mac's internal 4 gig hard drive partitioned to hold Mac OS 9 on one partition and OS X on the other, which doesn't leave much room for adding software. I have an 80 gig external Firewire drive which I'd love to use for installing OS X software, but when I install some packages, they are automatically placed on the internal drive/partition, and I'm running out of room. Is there any way I can force the software to be installed on the external drive and create links or aliases to them back in OS X (and if so, how?) I'm not (yet) a UNIX power user, but I'm familiar with the basics, and am not afraid to get my hands dirty. I would think that I should be able to create links to the actual files stored on a larger drive (surely that's a common situation). Any help would be greatly appreciated, as I am running scarcely low on space on my internal drive.

Also, for whatever reason, some of the partitions on my external drive have /usr, /var, /tmp, etc directories installed on them, which I didn't install. Is there a reason why they're there and do they need to be?

Thank you.

Mark
 
While I had thought of just copying them, I hadn't tried that yet because I know that many OS X programs install themselves into a specific directory structure, like /usr, /usr/bin, /etc :) Quite a number of the installer programs will require me to choose a disk (if they even allow me to choose an install location to begin with) that has Mac OS X on it, with all the other partitions unhilited. That's why I'm thinking that those are the ones that need to be installed into specific directories, and I don't want to mess around with those until I know what I'm doing. Other programs do let me choose any disk (partition) that I want, and so I suspect that they don't really care about /usr, /usr/bin, /etc... So in answer to your question, I can (and have) moved some program files to the external disk, but that won't work for other programs.

Thank you for your reply.
 
I am far from a power user but theoretically, it should work to make symbolic links. the command is ln -s.

Perhaps you could look into what I did and have better results. I had a usb 30 gig hard drive that wasn't supported under OS X and my 6 gig iMac hard drive was quickly running out of space. I opened up the case on the hard drive and dug around till I found my iMac's hard drive and found them to have the same size and shape so I switched them.

Things I looked out for and/or should have been cautious about: 1.) I spent a long time pondering whether the hard drives would swap, I took a risk and it worked. it might not for you. 2.) Getting out an iMac hard drive is not as easy as, say installing RAM. It is very much in violation with any Apple warranty. 3.) I forgot to load an operating system on my big drive so I almost got freaked out when the question mark disk showed up. Read about what sort of partitions you might need before undertaking the project. 4.)Once I realized that I could boot off a CD and install an operating system I partitioned it 8/22 without researching if I needed to or not. I thought I had read that OS X needs to be on the first 8 gigs but I don't know if that is true. I wouldn't mind having everything on the same partition but hey! I at least now have access to that drive so I'm not going to try to reformat any time soon.
 
Originally posted by mth71
While I had thought of just copying them, I hadn't tried that yet because I know that many OS X programs install themselves into a specific directory structure, like /usr, /usr/bin, /etc :) Quite a number of the installer programs will require me to choose a disk (if they even allow me to choose an install location to begin with) that has Mac OS X on it, with all the other partitions unhilited. That's why I'm thinking that those are the ones that need to be installed into specific directories, and I don't want to mess around with those until I know what I'm doing. Other programs do let me choose any disk (partition) that I want, and so I suspect that they don't really care about /usr, /usr/bin, /etc... So in answer to your question, I can (and have) moved some program files to the external disk, but that won't work for other programs.

Thank you for your reply.
Click to expand...

Umm, /usr, /usr/bin and /etc are system directories. The majority of all OSX applications install in /Macintosh HD/Applications. These CAN be moved anywhere you want.
 
But it is the minority of the others that are sucking up my hard drive space, which is why I want to see if there's any other way to store them. Plus, I just want to learn how to do things the UNIX way, as I know that larger systems must store some of their system files on other store devices (other filesystems). Utilities like Perl, Python, and Apple's developer tools have specific directory structures, and they like to install themselves on the same partition as OS X (although I was able to get Python to install properly on my external drive).

Thanks again for the reply.
 
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