Mounting HDs as folders

J

jrydh

Registered
Hello,

After consulting my older brother (OS X developer, btw), I've decided to split my future X partition into four parts: One for the system, one for the "User" and one for the "Applications" folders and one for a classic optimized 9.1. I've also decided to have a partition for the OS 9 system and one for the OS 9 applications (6 partitions in all). Naturally, I want the User, X app and the 9 apps partitions to be mounted as folders at their respective places.

The reason for doing this is mainly a safety precaution. I've been through too many hard disk crashes, and I've no effective backup system. Another reason is faster startup time if the system crashed and the startup drive must be checked for errors.

Also, the mounted volumes will override the folders that normally exists there, and from what I gather from my brother, that data is unavailable until the HD is unmounted. Is this correct? It would be great; if the users and/or the applications volume(s) crashes, I can still log in to the system and use the standard apps.

Ok, so what does it take to do this? I know I can, because my brother has a similar setup.

I suppose all the X partitions will show up when I boot into 9.1, is there a way to hide them?

Thx in advance,
 
There's probably a lot of people who would like to know how to control the mount points for different partitions in OS X like you can in any other Unix OS. I would love to know how to do this...

Maybe you could ask your brother (he is using OS X, not something like Linux, right?), and let us all know...
 
Drop into a terminal and read the man pages for "mnt" and "fstab". All your questions should be answered.

Also, you might want to check out some of the HOW-TO files on LDP (linux documentation project) on mounting partitions into your directory tree.

Hope this helps.

Still waiting for my copy of OS X to arrive.
 
Originally posted by GrBear
Drop into a terminal and read the man pages for "mnt" and "fstab". All your questions should be answered.

Also, you might want to check out some of the HOW-TO files on LDP (linux documentation project) on mounting partitions into your directory tree.

Hope this helps.

Still waiting for my copy of OS X to arrive.
Click to expand...

Okay, thanks for your help. I'll try it as soon as OS X final arrives here, still waiting...

/Johannes
 
Linux & X don't do things the same - you might want to check out one of the BSD-based web sites for that kind of data.

Also realize that OS X does thigns a bit different than the others BSDs, so be careful.

A simpler way to do what you what is to boot into single-user mode (hold down Cmd+S at startup) and create symlinks to these other volumes for the folders you want:

i.e.
ln -s /Volumes/Disk2/Applications Applications
ln -s /Volumes/Disk3/Users Users

Just a suggestion.
 
Yeah, now that I've got my copy of OS X finally, and now installed, that's the exact route I went. I created a couple symbolic links rather than mucking around with the fstab file(s).
 
Originally posted by GrBear
Yeah, now that I've got my copy of OS X finally, and now installed, that's the exact route I went. I created a couple symbolic links rather than mucking around with the fstab file(s).
Click to expand...

I haven't tried messing with this stuff yet (I've got too many burned-in images on my retinas from work to sit at my computer long at home ;)) but, I can tell you that the symlink thing won't give you the "backup apps" access that jrydh's mount points solution would have. That may be acceptable to you guys (and I don't know how to start trying that solution in Ten yet), I'm just saying...

-jab
 
[shatner]But why?[/shatner]

Seriously, why on earth would you want to split up a drive into multiple partitions? You won't save any disk space, in fact you'll waste some (or a lot).

It makes no sense to me.
 
strobe:

Why do you think multiple partitions wastes space? Generally the smaller the partition, the smaller the block size (ok, ok, not as much of an issue with HFS+ & UFS, but still...).

Also, I use multiple partitions (well, not THAT many) to segregate OS X & 9 - that way if I have to upgrade/reinstall X, it doesn't affect my 9 partition. That's also where I keep my home directory (and then build a symlink under /Users to it). It's been pretty handy since after a reinstall, a bit of user tweaking, and boom, all my wonderful preferences are right there.

Just wondering...

 
Yeah, I know (sigh), it's a pain, but only because not everyone has the same setup. If you had a series of NFS mounts that were uniform (say in a large NetInfo environment), then the links work just fine. They just need to include the full hostname and path (i.e. MyFile links to /Network/Servers/dude/Shared/myfile.doc).

 
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