When I originally formatted the drive in my Powerbook, I was still in the “old� mind-set of having a spare partition around just to have an extra OS available to boot from in the event my primary failed for some reason.

It’s been two years (jeez:  have I been using this 17“ *that* long?) now, and having never had a major problem w/ OS X, I think I’m ready to compress down from having FOUR partitions, to just two.

FOUR??  Yes, four.  Classic, Dev, Main and Scratch.  Dev was the one w/ the â€?spare“ OS on it.  I’m still not completely convinced to fly solo w/ just one OS partition, but I NEVER user Classic (I did two years ago), and I can easily rid myself of my Dev partition.  Since most of my dev work is web-based, it makes little sense to have an OS + partition dedicated to it.

Here’s a list of the reasons for wanting to re-partition:

  1. My free space is spread out over four partitions.  I feel like I have four toy chests, and sometimes none of them are quite big enough to fit my newest Tonka (like the fact that the Finder’s DVD burner requires a full DVD’s worth of free space on your boot partition to burn a DVD).
  2. The constant worry that my boot partition’s running low on space.  It’s got roughly 4.5 GB of free space, which is generally enough to deal w/ the above-mentioned DVD issue.  But dipping below that means irritation.
  3. I have to be mindful of where I record my EyeTV recordings.  I don’t want to fill that boot partition, now do I?
  4. World of Warcraft.  Their patching program INSISTS on having at LEAST 1 GB of free space.  Since the game sits on my Classic partition, I’m constantly having to be mindful of what kinds of crap I toss on there.

My plan of attack is to attach my FireWire HDD enclosure to the Powerbook and use Carbon Copy Cloner to take care of my boot partition, and then set the Powerbook to FireWire Target Disk Mode while connected to the Mac mini in order to copy the data off of the other partitions.  Once I’m convinced that I’ve got everything, it’s show time.

I’ll re-partition, keeping the Main and Scratch partitions, w/ Main getting most of the space.  This makes me a little nervous, but w/ OS X’s built-in Resistance of HFS Plus Fragmentation, I think I’m ready to take the plunge.  My original thought process was that keeping my boot partition as pristine as possible would limit the amount of fragmentation, and thereby keep my OS snappy.

Man, I’m nervous.  *sigh*

Old dog; new tricks.