OK, I'm thinking of installing Panther, but I want to be safe and make an exact backup of my current configuration, so I can just revert back completely to it if things go bad. Is there any way to do this,and how would I do it?
Use Carbon Copy Cloner and clone your hd to an external hd. I do so routinely to an external Firewire drive (which is also bootable) to run OS 9 utilities - Techtool Pro 3.x and DiskWarrior.