[dellilama]

I have a working install of SL with 3.0Gb free, but have been thinking of mounting /Applications, /Users, and perhaps /opt on a 16Gb SD card as per this thread:

Mounting a SDHC card to /Users via fstab

Any recommendations on how I should partition it? I'm not planning to do anything crazy like Xcode (altho that would be cool), but rather some dev apps and Macports would be great.

Your thoughts and experiences appreciated.

[ian]

Originally Posted by dellilama

I have a working install of SL with 3.0Gb free, but have been thinking of mounting /Applications, /Users, and perhaps /opt on a 16Gb SD card as per this thread:

Mounting a SDHC card to /Users via fstab

Any recommendations on how I should partition it? I'm not planning to do anything crazy like Xcode (altho that would be cool), but rather some dev apps and Macports would be great.

Your thoughts and experiences appreciated.

One thing I would suggest is to make sure that you have an admin login still on your boot disk. So, if anything goes badly wrong there is at least one account you can still login with. I create a "/Users2" directory, then use System Prefs to set my admin user's home directory there. Then I copy across that user's home directory from /Users to /Users2 and reboot to check everything else is okay. That means that if my drive fails with my /Users partition on it, then I can still log in and do admin type things.

[dellilama]

Thanks for the great advice! I'll try this tonight.

Any suggestions as to partition size? CodF4ther went with /Applications (3Gb), /Users (4Gb), and the rest fat32. I was leaning more toward a 4Gb /Applications and the rest to /Users. What do you think?

[dellilama]

Just a follow-up: After I moved /Users, /Applications, and /Developer to the SDHC, my sound and WiFi stopped working ("no airport installed"). I had to delete the files in /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration (after making a back-up) to get them back, then copied over the autodiskmount.plist.

I allocated the SDHC as follows:
- /Applications: 3Gb
- /Developer: 6.1 Gb
- /Users: 5.8Gb

I also created an administrative account and moved it to a /Users_safe folder as recommended above. So far so good.

[Akki]

I moved /Applications and /Developers off to my SDHC and have had mostly good results. /Users was just too slow. Saw one issue though with Disk Utilities fix permissions is very annoyed about the /Applications move. Apparently the SDHC is mounted "noowners" and I'm trying to figure out the fix.