Upgrading from Panther to Tiger

[biblicalfury]

I have a 3 1/2 year old iBook (12", 800 MHz, 640 MB Ram, 40 GB hard drive) that I am thinking of upgrading from Panther to Tiger. I've had a copy of 10.4 for quite a while (free from my college), but there was never really a need to upgrade. My computer works fine and I had I the programs I needed. But I'm thinking of getting an iPhone and that would require 10.4.

I'd appriciate input on a couple of questions I have.

(1) From what I've read, it seems the best bet is to do a clean install. Does that seem right?

(2) Before I do the upgrade, I'm planning on making a bootable copy of my hard drive on an external drive. Should I take any other precautions?

(3) Is it possible to save all of the messages I have in Mail so that I can still access them after the install?

Thanks!

[torchwood04]

1.) Yes, upgrading can make things kinda eeky (can, not will fyi), but I can't speak from experience.
2.) Dunno
3.) http://www.hawkwings.net/2005/09/26/backing-up-apple-mail/

[tdhurst]

Just do an archive and install, then throw away the old system folder. Everything will be the same.

[Str8edgepunker]

Just do an archive and install, then throw away the old system folder. Everything will be the same.

Not necessarily. There are some things that might not have been copied over to the new system once this is done. I'd go through each folder and make sure I didn't miss anything. ;)

[tdhurst]

Not necessarily. There are some things that might not have been copied over to the new system once this is done. I'd go through each folder and make sure I didn't miss anything. ;)

Each folder in your system folder? Yeah, not sure I would recommend doing that unless you really know what you're doing, though.

[yellow]

Frankly, I've found the Upgrade path to work suprisingly well.

As long as you haven't been too adventurous in your downloads and installs of items that have kernel extensions, there's no need to do a clean install or and archive & install.

The Upgrade button works great.

[jsw]

(2) Before I do the upgrade, I'm planning on making a bootable copy of my hard drive on an external drive. Should I take any other precautions?
Assuming you've done that and tested it with booting from it, I think yellow's advice is the way to go. If it fails for whatever reason, you can always clone the external back to the internal and try a different approach.

[biblicalfury]

Assuming you've done that and tested it with booting from it, I think yellow's advice is the way to go. If it fails for whatever reason, you can always clone the external back to the internal and try a different approach.

Thanks for the help everyone. I just finished a straight upgrade and everything seems to be running smoothly so far, although there is a bit of a delay as I'm typing this that usually isn't there.

[yellow]

Thanks for the help everyone. I just finished a straight upgrade and everything seems to be running smoothly so far, although there is a bit of a delay as I'm typing this that usually isn't there.

I suspect that is because Spotlight is indexing the drive, which takes a while and hogs resources until it's done.