Boot from External Question

[Merser]

Sorry for the noob question here, I am kind of new to all this.

I recently purchased a OWC 500gb external HD. In the past few weeks I have already captured about 100gb worth of video and photos on it.

My Macbook has been running a bit slugish recently and I have thought about doing a clean install once leopard comes out.

Here is my question...

How do I go about doing that?

I understand that if you partition a HD you loose all existing info. Since I have already captured 100gb worth of mini dv tapes I would hate to loose all that or to do it all over again.

Do i have to partitian the drive in order to make a full copy to install from?

 

[blodwyn]

Sorry for the noob question here, I am kind of new to all this.

I recently purchased a OWC 500gb external HD. In the past few weeks I have already captured about 100gb worth of video and photos on it.

My Macbook has been running a bit slugish recently and I have thought about doing a clean install once leopard comes out.

Here is my question...

How do I go about doing that?

I understand that if you partition a HD you loose all existing info. Since I have already captured 100gb worth of mini dv tapes I would hate to loose all that or to do it all over again.

Do i have to partitian the drive in order to make a full copy to install from?

Not quite sure I follow your issue regarding a clean install. What's stopping you just doing a clean Leopard install over the top of your existing internal MacBook disk? To do that you don't need to touch your external disk at all. If you're worried about losing something then you could always make a SuperDuper full backup of your existing Tiger system to an image file on your external.

The way I would go would be to get another external disk and set that up with the partitioning scheme you want. Once you're done with the Leopard upgrade it will make a good backup disk for the 100GB of video and photos you have on your current external, which is just waiting for the worst possible moment to fail on you