Some old habits die hard and so last night I reformatted my 18 month old macbook pro. I had felt that it was starting to run a bit slow than ‘normal’ and I recently had a problem with a kernel panic (caused when testing a up to 21mb USB modem).

So I have a ‘clean’ new computer and that has also given me a chance to think about what to reinstall.

Create a Dual Partition for system and personal data

I have done this on every computer for at least 10 years now and it makes good sense. Always partition your hard drive into 2 sectors – one for the operating system and one for all your data.

Move your Mac OSx Account Home to your new partition

Having partitioned my Mac, its easy to go to System Preferences > Accounts and change the location of the Home / User Folder.

Joy of Recovering the Home Folder

After I reformatted my mac and pointed the system prefpane to my old Home account folder, I discovered that all my system preferences and account settings had been recovered as well. Joy! on windows even if you had backed up and recovered your program files or windows folder … you couldn’t recover registry files quite as easily as this.

Joy!

Damien Saunders

Tip of the day: Windows Vista clean install doesn’t work on a partitioned drive AND if you then partition the drive after installing Vista, the SP2 will not install as well.

Effectively this means you should keep your primary drive as 1 partition … or wait til after you’ve installed Vista and all the service packs.

There is a short microsoft kb on this ….

Will this affect installing Windows 7 for the same reason … I think so.

Damien Saunders