So, for our office, we have an (old) Mac Mini. Nothing special, Core 2 Duo, 160GB drive, 2GB RAM. Terrible specs, but it's only for QA testing, it doesn't need to be quick.

 

What it does need to do is to hold more than one version of OS X for testing. We're currently up to 4 (10.6-10.9 inclusive) and I'm trying to get Yosemite onto it. The obvious thing to do is replace the 10.6 partition. Fine. The drawback? The installer for 10.7 is stored on my 10.6 partition. Ditto, the 10.8 installer is on 10.7, etc. So I need to preserve these if at all possible in case I need to reinstall one of those OSes. I'm copying all the installers to an external drive for now, and I'll figure out how to make installation DVDs later or something.

 

Next problem - I've used Disk Utility to try and rearrange some space so the partitions are all equal sizes. Currently the 10.6 partition I'm looking to replace is the smallest of the four and thus is the one that Yosemite is least likely to fit on. Shrinking existing partitions is no problem for Disk Utility. However, you don't seem to be able to move a partition on the disk, so you can't add space to the first partition on the disk. I can only add the space back to the partition I took it from, because that's where the free space is. Two questions spring to mind - what's the point of that, it makes the feature utterly useless? And the bigger one, is there another tool I can use to move partitions around in order to get the space attached to the partition I actually need it on?

 

I'm really not a Mac person but I can usually Google with the best of them, however this topic is eluding me with regards to anything useful...

Sorry I can't help you I am also not a Mac person but that said I am trying to get into it! :-)

 

Bought my first Mac on Thursday and so far so good I really like it.. 

 

Made me giggle though, the first thing I installed were VMware Fusion then loaded Windows 8.1 in a VM "Just incase" :P

 

I am sure another member maybe able to assist.

I've been thinking about buying one (prices are comparable to the PC laptops I've been looking at, I get a contribution from work so I can go for something "really nice" for "average" money, and it'd be useful to have experience of OS X as well as Windows/Linux/Unix). But then I sit down and try and do something productive on OS X tonight, and I could have quite happily thrown this Mini out of the window into the garden on several occasions.

 

Turns out Yosemite fits on my tiny partition, there must have been loads of data stored on Snow Leopard (which is tough, it's gone now, and anyone who left the only copy of any important data on a test machine which is likely to get broken/wiped at any time is more than welcome to come and "discuss" it with me tomorrow ). So the crisis is now over, and the thing I wanted to test works fine. Still infuriating that the util lets me shrink a partition but not move it; if I didn't want to use the space somewhere else on the disk then why would I even bother shrinking it, makes no sense!