How can I run Tiger from my HD and Leopard from my Firewire?

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dpuleojr

Registered
Hello,

I've got a Powerbook G4 running 10.4.11. I have a .dmg of Leopard on a Firewire drive. I would like to try running Leopard from the Firewire drive as an experiment. So, Tiger and my local HD would be the primary means of booting, but i'd like to be able to choose to boot Leopard from the FW drive occasionally just to play with. Is this possible? If yes are there any instructions out there for how to do this?

Thanks!
 
Leopard does not come as a DMG file -- it comes on a DVD disk. Where did this DMG file come from?

You can have as many OS X installations on as many hard drives/partitions as you like, and you can use the "Startup Disk" system preference to switch between all of them. Basically, all you need to do is install Leopard on your external drive. To install Leopard, simply boot from the Leopard Install DVD and choose your FireWire drive as the target for installation.
 
When you install Leopard use the menu item to find "Disk Utility" (before you go to far during the install process). . Launch it and let it find the Firewire hard disk. Then highlight that drive and in the right hand pane select 'Partition". In the Partition pane select 1 Partition and then look near the bottom and select 'Options'. A drop down will come to format the drive to make os install on either PPC Mac or Intel Mac (it will tell which one you want). You must do this to make the drive a bootable drive to install OS X on.
 
Thanks to you both for the tips...but...Yikes! Will formating the drive in this manner erase everything that is currently on it? I do not want to risk losing the data on my firewire...also I would be attempting to install Leopard from a .dmg on the very same firewire. I don't understand if this is possible or not.
 
If you only have a .dmg, it means you've got a pirated version of Leopard. We don't help you here on that. You require the retail version of Mac OS X 10.5.x in order to install. Installing will *not* require you to reformat the harddisk, the files on it will generally be untouched - unless the harddrive is formatted in a format that doesn't meet OS X' requirements (but you'll see that before installation takes place).

So... Buy the retail disk for Leopard at an Apple Store or reseller (or online) and simply try it. The installer will let you choose the FW harddrive if it's ready for installation.
 
Thanks Fyrke. I dunno what i'm going to do. This article suggests that I will lose data when installing Leopard to my FW drive

http://byronmiller.typepad.com/byronmiller/2007/11/loading-leapoar.html

"Rather than trying to repartition the drive during installation, I chose to do it in OS X Tiger. Sure enough when I opened the Disk Utility and chose my drive (not the indented volume), lo and behold the Partition tab showed up.

The actual GUID option is buried. You need to click the Options button and a window opens with several options including GUID. Click it, then click Partition and you're good to go.

Keep in mind that when you repartition the drive (even if you only create a single partition as I did), you end up erasing what's on it. Since this was my data back up for my MBP it was a bit disconcerting, but if you want to load the OS, in this instance, you need to blow away the data when partition the drive. Just don't forget to back up your files again after you install the OS."
 
As I said: Reformatting the drive *will* of course erase it. But if it *is* already formatted as HFS+, you don't _have_ to erase it in order to install OS X on it. Tiger, Leopard doesn't matter. It depends on whether the drive is currently in a partition scheme and format that the Mac can boot from. You'll see that when booting from the Leopard DVD and trying to install Leopard on the drive. The installer will inform you whether that's going to work _before_ installing.
 
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