barhar,
thank you for the response. am in the process of making the disk image backup per your instructions. so far so good.
couple more questions, if you please:
once i have installed osx:
1. in order to boot to either system at startup i assume i would hold the option key as i do...
Currently have os9 on Titanium laptop and osx on firewire drive. Did that while getting used to osx.
Now I want to install osx on the laptop, so that it will run faster and to avoid a problem that occurs when I have a freeze in os9 that makes the firewire drive unusable for up to an hours...