>Why can't I boot from the 8.5 disk tools floppy (as described in previous >post?) and partition, install, augment, from there?
Oops, I'm sorry to imply that you can't. You certainly can do what you are asking! OS 8.5 disk tools will work just fine. (If you intend to make a RAM disk with the disk tools stuff AND AppleShare bits & pieces, you might make sure you have enough RAM before starting) Boot from the floppy, reformat, drag the Disk Tools system folder to the HD (it will complain about not being a valid system folder for booting from a hard drive), augment it with networking extensions, and you are home free. >Aside from the fact that the very idea of a separate VM partition sounds too >clever to ignore, if it's very small it can hardly get fragmented too badly. >Or can it? And once fragged, can't it then be reformatted without going >through all this nervewracking timeconsuming song and dance of redoing the >whole drive? Well, that sort of depends. Once you partition a disk, if you want to reformat an individual partition using a Drive Setup, you have to reformat the ENTIRE disk. IMO this is a major fault of drive setup, but I understand it does this to protect the integrity of the partition table. You can jump through hoops using 3rd party disk formatters (or my favorite - pdisk) to format individual partitions... But what I believe you are thinking of is not re-formatting the partition but optimizing or defragmenting it. You _can_ do that to individual partitions without trouble. DiskWarrior does this excellently. >Since I'm going to be away and using the 5300 constantly the first few weeks >of Feb all of these potentially treacherous procedures had better wait till >afterwards anyway. But surely there's got to be a normal standard usual way >to reformat a drive and reinstall the OS on a computer without a CD drive? Good idea about waiting... Have you considered just backing down to OS 8.1 for the lesser RAM requirements? As for a standard way to reformat w/o a CD, I'd say that there isn't one. Very few Macs shipped without CD-ROMs that couldn't also be booted from a System 7.5 floppy disk. Duo 2300, PB 190, and PB 1400 are about the only ones. Previously, the standard was to boot off the Utilities floppy that came with the computer (Is that right? It's been so long since I used System 7....) and use a tool like HD SC Setup. I'd seriously suggest investing in a SCSI adapter and a SCSI Disk Mode (SDM) cable so you can do SDM or use an external CD or HD when you have to. Here's a question for VM/disk drive gurus: If you decrease the minimum block size from 4K to .5K under HFS+, will this speed up VM? When VM reads from a drive, it reads a whole block at once. If the blocks are smaller, will this speed it up? Peace, Drew -- Author of ClassicStumbler email: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> web: <http://homepage.mac.com/alk/> Want to know if your neighbor has Wi-Fi? Find out with ClassicStumbler! <http://homepage.mac.com/alk/classicstumbler/> -- PowerBooks is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Enter To Win A | -- Canon PowerShot Digital Cameras start at $299 | Free iBook! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> PowerBooks list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/powerbooks.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/powerbooks%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
