Another thing that bugged me since I got my MacBook is, that it is shipped with ONE big (80GB for me) partition where everything is stored. So when cleaning out the system by reinstalling everything you first have to backup your data and afterwards restore them. Coming from the Linux world where everyone has at least 3 partitions (:D [/, /home, swap]) this situation annoyed me a tiny bit.
Allthough searching around for a while I didn't find a solution how to achieve this - because it is so easy...
NOTE: For some reason in a lot of mac forums people tell you things against partitioning, but I decided to do it anyway.
Because I was a novice when switching to MacOSX I found it time to format my MacBook and start fresh. At this point I also made partitions:
- "Macintosh HD": 20.5GB for MacOSX and Applications etc.
- "Home": 14.8GB for my home directory (/Users/*)
- "Media": 38.7GB for storing programs, music etc. - so, huge files that I do not backup frequently...
When booting from your MacOSX Install DVD just use the DiskUtility from the menubar to partition your hard-drive. I partitioned it as mentioned above, installed MacOSX on the "Macintosh HD" and booted successfully after the installation. Setup your User etc.
Don't bother to change preferences... Just reboot into your MacOSX Install DVD again and open the Terminal:
$ df -h
This should list you all your partitions (like /Volumes/Macintosh HD, /Volumes/Home, etc)! So you see, they get mounted automatically and you don't have to bother with /etc/fstab which isn't used in MacOSX! (this was the first thing I didn't understand and struggled at the beginning :D)
Now, let's move the contents of /Users (this is where your home-directory "lives" under OSX):
$ mv /Users/* /Volumes/Home
As you can see I only moved the contents and not the /Users directory itself... Just some aesthetic reasons :D
Now we are finished almost and the only thing to do is to link /Users to the new location:
$ rm -R /Users # remove unused and empty /Users directory
$ ln -s /Volumes/Home /Users
Now reboot and manually restore your backup data :D
Because of being such a stud I formatted my partitions with "HFS+ journaled (case-sensitive)". As it turns out there might be problems with programs (i.e. DeepSleep Widget) when using a "case-sensitive" filesystem. "DeepSleep" is the only program that I had problems with (I solved them by changing the first char of some files to upper-case) - but if I run into more problems I might change to the default "HFS+ journaled" filesystem... Anyone a solution for doing this without formatting again??