multiple versions of ProTools on one computer?

[KingTor]

Back in a former life I worked at a facility which was a beta tester for the WaveFrame, and we used to have several versions of the WaveFrame software available on each of our workstations so that we could back up to a more stable version in a mission critical setting, but keep beta testing when we had more time to muck about. I'm trying to come up with a similar setup on my TDM system, so that we can use 7.1 to edit, avoiding the infamous "assertion" bug, and that we can mix on 7.2, taking advantage of the really hot new features.

I'm assuming that this isn't supported by DigiDesign, but what I'm wondering is if anyone has tried it. If so, how did you set it up and how did it work?

Thanks in advance.

Tor

[scottBurton]

I was wondering about this the other day.

Best I could come up with was to keep multiple installations of Mac OS X on a machine, each in their own partition, say. Sounds cumbersome but it's actually not a big deal if you're familiar with Disk Utility and managing disk images.

[KingTor]

Yeah, that's more or less how I was thinking of doing it. Disk Utility is very familiar to me, managing disk images, not so much.

Once I've got the new partition with ProTools 7.1 on it, how do I tell the Mac which one to boot in? I remember Startup Disk in OS 9, but I'm not in front of a Mac right now.

[Avid]

To choose which startup system to use on OS X, hold down the Option key during bootup.

Or use the Startup Disk in System Preferences before rebooting.

(I usually use the Option key so that I can keep the same Startup system as the default without changing the system prefs)

[KingTor]

Thanks.

I'm in the midst of setting this up right now.