HD patitioning

I have a MacBook Pro with 320G HD
I am planning on reformatting and instead of installing everything back on one partition, how about if I install the OS on one partition and the non OS on another.?
what would be a recommended split ?
where do Applications usually reside ? on the OS partion or the non-OS ?

appreciate your recommendations

just out of curiosity .... why would you want to split the disk in 2 partitions ?

Cheers ... McBie

The purpose of the split is to allow for possible reinstallation of the OSX to get rid of unwanted apps ( over the years the system gets bloated with plists and other preferences that no utility app can extract while uninstallting of an app)

McBie said:

just out of curiosity .... why would you want to split the disk in 2 partitions ?

Cheers ... McBie

Click to expand...

Getting bloated with plists is really not a reason to split the partitions. I literally install and uninstall hundreds of apps a year. The last I did a fresh install was during the first week of Leopard, so call it 2 years now. I currently have 2,841 items in my users Preferences folder. It's total size is 15.4 MB. The System Preferences folder size total is at 3.8MB.

It would take many years more than you'll be using that same machine with the smallest hard drive Apple ships today for the size of those folders to ever become of any consequence.

A clean install would really only clean the smaller of those two folders. As soon as you do an upgrade install, archive and install or a fresh install using migration assistant or restore from a Time Machine backup, you've just re-imported the larger of the two.