New Mini User Questions

[JaGal]

I bought a late 2009 2.53 GHz Mini refurb and have been researching how best to migrate from my trusty G4 Sawtooth. I’ve managed to thoroughly confuse myself so I have a couple of questions before I power up the Mini. Is it a good idea to partition the Mini’s 320gb internal drive? If so, how large should the OSX partition be? I won’t do anything intensive with the mini, mainly email, web surfing, iTunes and simple photo editing. I’m confused about whether this will erase the contents of the drive but obviously have the OSX disks and I can create a backup just in case, which leads me to my next question.

My external drive is a fairly new Seagate FreeAgent 500gb I formatted to Mac OS Extended (journaled) with an APM partition scheme and created two partitions, one for a bootable backup (with SuperDuper) of the G4 and the other for media storage. Only the backup partition has anything in it. Will I be able to use it to backup up both the G4 and the Mini? I am aware that I should use a GUID partition scheme for Intel Mac so does this mean that if I reformat the drive for Intel that I can’t? Or does it just mean that I won’t be able to create a bootable G4 backup?

Another external drive from OWC is on my wish list but right now I have to make do with one. I will obviously lose my G4 backup if I reformat so just trying to figure out what my options are.
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Mac Mini 2.53 Intel C2D 4GB 320 GB
PM G4 AGP 400 MHz 1.12GB
30GB iPod Classic, iPod Touch (8GB, 2nd gen)

[MlNlME]

It's neither a good idea nor a bad idea to partition your internal drive. It's just personal preference. Personally, I do partition since I generally have a good idea for how much space I need on each. I also prefer having my OS and app related files on the boot part, and my music/vidoes/photos/docs on another partition. Any backup drive I have also matches the internal HD's partition scheme so I can do a one-to-one clone with SuperDuper or whatever. But again, this is all just personal preferences.

As for your external drive, if you set it to use GUID partition scheme, you will not be able to boot your G4 mac. You're just going to have to choose which one you want to be bootable. I'd suggest getting a 16GB USB flash drive and install OS X on it and use that as an emergency bootable backup drive for your G4.

EDIT:
You can install OS X on an 8GB flash drive as well.

[JaGal]

Thank you so much MiNiME!
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Mac Mini 2.53 Intel C2D 4GB 320 GB
PM G4 AGP 400 MHz 1.12GB
30GB iPod Classic, iPod Touch (8GB, 2nd gen)

[billb]

Let me describe what I've done
and maybe it will prove helpful.

I have an old PPC iMac G4 (OS x 10.5) which has "AppleWorks" on it.
But I primarily use an Intel mini without AppleWorks.
Sooooooo, whenever I wanted to use AppleWorks I need
to fire up the iMac. That got to be a pain. I ended up
Configuring an external Firewire HD using the GUID format
used by the Intel. Then I reformatted the GUID to APM using
the PPC Mac and cloned the iMac PPC to the newly formatted
APM external Firewire Hard Drive using Carbon Copy Cloner.
Whenever I want to use AppleWorks I simply plug in the external
HD with my PPC Clone on it and reboot the Intel Mac
holding down the option key and choose to boot from
the PPC Clone.

Both work fine running on the Intel mini.
What you may be able to do is partition your HD and install
a Clone of your PPC on one partition and a clone of
Snow Leopard on the other Partition and you could
hold down your Option Key at boot time and choose
what OS you would like to use. BTW, if you are Booted
into Snow Leopard you could easily dig down into your
PPC Partition which should have an Icon for it on your
Desktop and launch an App. which isn't installed on
Snow Leopard. It'll launch and work fine.

What I ended up doing was dragging the AppleWorks
App. from the PPC clone to my App.'s folder on the
Intel and it was copied. It is now installed on the Intel
and works fine.

I hope this was helpful. If you need me to clarify
or expand on anything, just let me know.
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2011 Mac mini 2.7 GHz i7 with
16GB RAM, Samsung 512GB SSD
MacBook AIR 11 Inch
Mac mini, Model 1.1, 2.33 GHz C2D Proc
20" iMac G4 PPC