Dual boot Leopard - Tiger?

[molecola]

hi as every recent mac switcher (thats not actually true: i retained my XP home rig) my macbook is preloaded with leopard so i'm considering to add a minimal tiger install reserved for PTLE. i would like to keep my existing leopard install for everyday use so that when finally PT will be ready i'll just remove tiger recover space and go ahead. so leopard should stay where it is now (the first 30G or so of my 80G hd) but i'm afraid tiger would fall on a much slower area of the disk and maybe have some trouble: and i dont want to pay for an older OS version if its not gonna work for me (i already paid for the OS you know). i understand this is maybe better related to some kind of macintosh forum but i'm really a mac newbie and since PT is quite a strange beast i just thought someone with a similar experience in the real world could provide some useful info or help. thanx alot.

[Mount Royal]

Consider using an external drive for the Tiger OS. If instead you use the OEM internal drive, you'll need to create two partitions on that drive after erasing the drive. One partition would receive 10.5; the other receives 10.4. PT is installed on both. When you no longer need the Tiger OS, you'll again need to erase the drive and remove that Tiger partition. In any case, I'd expect no problem with the dual OS approach. I still keep a Tiger OS on an external FW drive, so I can revert to it when the Leopard problems impede workflow.

John-

[molecola]

john
1st of all thanx for your attention. i previously considered your proposed solution since of course i already got an ext fw drive (two partitions: hfs+ & ntfs since i own xp & ubuntu systems also). what made me unsure about this is the fact that i basically would happen to record audio on the system drive. so maybe i should need two ext drives? one just for tiger PT etc and the other one for audio?
i thought (in a very pc-fashioned way i must admit it ) i could just shrink the leopard partition to make room - after a good backup of course - then repair permissions verify everything and install tiger on the new volume of the same drive. i would expect to catch this opportunity to move my home dir to a separate partition too so that everything would be straight in its place... but you tell me i have to erase the whole disk each time i wanna create modify or erase a partition: i wasnt aware of this.
so still no idea about the most workable and effective solution at the moment.
thanx alot.

[Mount Royal]

Partitioning a drive requires erasing it first. As recording audio to the internal drive, that's fine. I'd go with an external drive for flexibility, though.

Best,

John-

[molecola]

oh ok i just didnt know about erasing when partitioning in OSX. i was used to XP. quite strange though: on linux (which is unix-based too) you can do whatever you want with volumes w/o erasing. yes better backup first but you boot from cd and go.
as for the drive: i was not saying i'm gonna record on the internal stock drive (which with limited track count could work) i was just saying that if tiger is gonna boot from the fw drive and i record audio on another partition on the same external drive i'm actually recording on the system drive which sure could work and sure its faster and more reliable than the internal one but i think its not a good thing.
thanx again.

[SandyCrack]

My personal preference has always been to partition the system drive and dual boot from there. I don't have the luxury of a dedicated system for PT so it makes sense for me since I always record to either a firewire or eSATA drive.

I understand though that it may be a little too much work for some, especially if you're new to the platform. The way I see it, OS updates always have to potential to cause problems on a system that's dedicated to a single use, such as DAW's. I like to have my DAW partition as lean and consistent as possible which is why I'm not planning on using PT on Leopard until there are some real benefits in the way of bug fixes or significant new features that can't be had on Tiger.

[Mount Royal]

...i was just saying that if tiger is gonna boot from the fw drive and i record audio on another partition on the same external drive i'm actually recording on the system drive which sure could work and sure its faster and more reliable than the internal one but i think its not a good thing.
thanx again.

Yes. The same physical drive will, as I understand it, behave in the same (or worse) way if audio streams from another partition on that drive. Given the cost of external drives, and the cost of Superduper as a backup utility, I vote for another FW/SATA drive and a very liberal backup policy.

[cancurry]

You can partition your drive without erasing - I have done it to add a Tiger partition to my Leopard setup - just backup your important stuff first.

Cheers
Ben

[The Night Train]

When Apple did the Intel switch over and stared using GUID partition table it allowed for partitioning a drive without having to reinitialize/erase it. My Mac Pro (pre harpertown model - 2.66) that I got in December shipped with Leopard (10.5.0) and the fist thing I did was create a second partition this way.. I had nothing to lose on there because it was the fist time I booted up the machine but if you have ANY data its always a good idea to have it backed up before doing anything like this..

[molecola]

hey lots of news...
if going towards dual boot i think tiger should by any means stay at the very start of the drive: the first 30/35% or so in ANY drive is significantly faster. this is mechanical not OS dependant. that said, the largest the drive the largest that early infamous "performance zone". so probably the night train has a bigger drive than myself (160GB at least i suppose) because he managed his second tiger partition soon after leopard. how much space did you reserve for your stock leopard install and how much for tiger? i would really like to perform a minimal tiger install because basically PT alone would run there. as i said my internal drive is 80GB only so i would be happy to move my home on a third and last partition to leave room at start: i don't mean if data stay on the slowest disk sector as long as they're photos mp3s emails and so on. all my XP/linux machines run fine this way. can i just clone my existing leopard partition using superduper or disk utility and then restore it "as is" on another volume just after my new tiger install?
mount royal: i definitely agree. for a viable setup a couple of ext drives are almost mandatory. backup is necessary in any case. my audio drive (maxtor one touch II) has 2 fw ports and i still have a spare iomega fw enclosure which supports drives up to 120GB where i could put a 60GB maxtor spare drive for tiger... i'm not sure if it will work well as the last into the fw chain. lots of stuff with power supplies btw.
again, thanx to everybody.