I have until now dedicated my Mac Mini to a WinXP partition (via BootCamp) and another partition to test out a certain nonstandard version of OS X, of which I cannot say more due to nondisclosure and Apple’s Men in Black. Having decided to use the Mini for all my High Def experimentation with EyeTV, etc, it’s been a bit of a pain using this configuration. I haven’t been able to upgrade to the latest version of EyeTV because it goes crashy crashy under the nonstandard OS, and previous EyeTV versions which are more stable will not export video from the program itself.

More after the jump…

After reaching the point of “I have had enough of this nonstandard OS instability with EyeTV”, I decided to repartition my disk to install Tiger along side my nonstandard OSX. I initially tried using diskutil to resize the volume and create a second partition in the remaining free space, This did not work because when you do a lot of video recording (which I have been doing quite a lot of) you quickly defragment your disk.

Taking a peek at the disk use revealed that I had blocks of data all over the place. This is when most people would have simply coughed up the cash for an OS X disk defragmenter like iDefrag. However, my husband is already giving me a hard time over all new equipment and software purchases, so I needed a cheaper way to get out of the situation.

I used the oldest defragging trick in the book instead. I copied the nonstandard OS disk contents to an external disk, reformatted the original drive partition (using diskutil eraseVolume), then created two partitions out of the original (using diskutil resizeVolume). I installed Tiger onto one of the two new partitions and copied my nonstandard OSX disk contents back onto the second.

This gave me a Mac Mini with a 45 GB Tiger partition, a 35 GB nonstandard OSX partition, and a 10 GB WinXP partition, which is a lot of slicing and dicing for a poor little 100GB disk.

Anyway, I haven’t done much with the new setup because it took all day with all the reformatting and OS installation and such. I’m pleased to report that EyeTV 2.3.3 works fine under 10.4 and I’ll be testing it out with the remote control and trying to export when I get a chance.

I changed the EyeTV settings in the nonstandard partition to point to the Tiger partition’s EyeTV folder, so hopefully all my recordings and schedules will be shared between the two operating systems. I don’t want to use an always-on external disk for the moment, mostly because of desk space limitations. My desk is covered with Macs, Zunes, iPods, and Pocket PCs not to mention routers, power-strips, keyboards, mice, and speakers besides the obligatory pencil jars, phones and file folders. I did pack up the soldering iron and multimeter to make a little breathing room for now.