Safe to install MacOS X on a separate drive?

[AlanB]

Hi,

I am currently running MacOS 9.2.2 on my Quicksilver G4/933. When I bought my G4, I initialized the disk to remove all traces of MacOS X before reinstalling only MacOS 9.2.2 on the internal drive. My Pro Tools system (MixCore, one vintage DSP farm, and PT software (5.1.1) is running from this system, with my PT sessions recorded onto a second internal ATA drive. At present, everything works great.

I'd really like to be able to check out MacOS 10.2 (Jaguar), but I'm afraid of installing it on the same drive as my very smooth and stable Pro Tools system. I know that it installs a lot of invisible files and that some users have reported trouble with installing X on top of a pre-existing MacOS 9 on the same drive, different partition.

So my question is -- Is it safe to install MacOS 10.2 on a separate physical drive? Or will this affect my existing system? For example, I would like to install 10.2 (and a separate 9.2.2 to use for 'Classic' mode) on my external firewire hard drive, while maintaining my current 9.2.2-ONLY drive for Pro Tools.

If I install MacOS 10.2 on my external FW drive in this manner, will the installation (and subsequent running of MacOS 10.2 on this computer) affect my existing 9.2.2-ONLY drive, or happily co-exist with it? Again, I would not be using the 9.2.2-ONLY drive for Classic mode.

Has anyone else installed MacOS X on a separate HD with success? Or does this cause stability issues with your PT drive? Any help or advice would be appreciated!

Thanks,
Alan

[soundboy69]

It's probably safe. FWIW- I left OS X on my 933 the way it came out of the box (dual-boot), and it has never (knock on wood) crashed... [img]images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[Kenny Gioia]

I partitioned my system drive into two seperate halves and installed OSX on one and OS9 on the other.

No problems here.

P.S. I couldn't get OSX to Install on my firewire drive. It just wasn't an option.

[Paul Turpin]

I've done the OS X on a firewire drive thing. It's cool to use it as a "floating" computer by booting diffferent machines on it. I've got my Ableton live for OS X running on the Firewire boot drive. This way I can diddle with stuff in Live in any room I boot it up in. The only down side is that the computer needs to be new enough to boot from firewire. I believe you can cold boot directly to firewire by holding down the 'F' key during startup (instead of 'C' for forced CD boot-up).