Can one backup partition store two bootable ones?

[jimwg]

Greetings:

 

Upon purchase of my LaCie Quadra drive, I was surprised and pleased by the performance of Retrospect 6.1. I created six Quadra partitions; two of them duplicate the two partitions on my iMac and are bootable, and a third Quadra partition contains a secondary backup of my iMac partitions in the form of One-Button cataloged files.

 

I'd like to try to further free more space by, if possible, somehow installing my iMac's two partitions on one Quadra partition, separated somehow as individual disk partitions which are still bootable, or having easily accessible files which can be readily copied to a new empty drive.

 

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

Jim

 

 

 

[CallMeDave]

installing my iMac's two partitions on one Quadra partition, separated somehow as individual disk partitions which are still bootable

 

No; OS X requires its own dedicated logical volume (disk partition) to be bootable. Has nothing to do with Retrospect.

[jimwg]

Thanks for your response! Maybe I should clarify my situation deeper:

 

I recently purchased a 320gig LaCie Quadra HD to backup my 10.4.11 iMac and 900mHz G3 iBook. I partitioned the Quadra six ways so I'd two to clone my iMac's Tiger and and Panther partitions, one to clone my iBook, and partitions for Linux and free space for any DOS use. Each partition is around 50 gigs in size. It works very very well via Retrospect 6.1 which came with the drive. The thing is there's oddles of "empty space" in the cloned partitions since my iMac's two partitions are 20gigs each, leaving me with over 32gigs unused on their cloned Quadra partitions. I'd gladly stuff files into the clone partitions but was told that (Retrospect anyway) would wipe out any data that wasn't originally on the iMac during backups. Is there any way to use all that unused space in my cloned partitions?

 

Thanks for any suggestions!

 

Jim

Edited April 6, 2009 by Guest

[Lennart_T]

Is there any way to use all that unused space in my cloned partitions?

Not exactly. If you run Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5.x) it is (often) possible to resize the partitions without losing data. That means you can reduce the size of one partition with lots of free space in favour of another with less space.