Open the Disk Utility application which you will find in the Utilities subfolder of the Applications folder. I recommend ensuring that you have a current back up of your data before partitioning. Partitioning the internal hard drive is a very easy procedure, but you must pay attention to ensure that you do not lose any data. I don’t recommend relying solely on Time Machine, so get a spare external hard drive and perform a clone using software such as Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! Tip: Do not partition your hard drive without, first, backing up your data. This short screencast describes the partitioning process, outlined in this tutorial, in just a couple of minutes. The advantage of partitioning the hard drive is that the operating system will be more responsive and you’ve not spent any money on a third-party application in order to do it. The drawbacks of virtualisation is the cost and performance. Being a Mac owner, you are spoilt for choice with VMWare Fusion, Parallels or Virtualbox. This means that I can test the features and functionality of OS X Mavericks without compromising my every day working with OS X Mountain Lion.įor many people, virtualisation is the answer and this generally works well. It runs alongside, but completely separately from, OS X Mountain Lion. This is especially true if your Mac is your only computer.įor example, by partitioning my Mac’s hard drive, I have been able to install OS X Mavericks as a separate installation. If, like me, you consider yourself a bit of a tech-head then being able to run multiple versions of OS X, on one Mac, has its advantages. On the face of it, one might wonder what the purpose of running multiple versions of OS X might be? For most users, without more than a passing interest, there is no reason to partition the internal drive.įor those who are interested, and for those who have a more compelling reason to, then partitioning to run multiple versions of OS X might provide advantages. In this tutorial, I will show you how to partition and prepare your Mac’s internal hard drive such that you can boot the machine into your choice of a number of versions of OS X. And there are good reasons for doing this. Luckily, the latter has grown faster and now it is possible to run two, or more, different versions of OS X, side-by-side, on the same internal hard drive. The size of operating systems is growing, as is the size of internal storage.

Why partition disk mac