Cloning Tiger System to FAT32 Drive Before Installing Leopard?

[Greg_C]

I finally got around to buying Leopard and am looking to install it ASAP, but I have a quick question before I go ahead with the process...I'm planning on doing an Archive & Install (seems to be a great compromise between a clean system and maintaining everything on my MBP as it is). However, just to be safe I'm going to back up my system using Carbon Copy Cloner to my external HDD, which is formatted as a FAT32 partition. My question is will I be able to boot off of this clone if I need to, even though its on a FAT32 partition (as opposed to an HFS+ Journaled one)? This might also be useful if I change my mind and do a clean install and then use Migration Assistant to restore everything - I just want to make sure this backup would be usable on a FAT32 drive. Thanks!

Edit: One more question - Would Migration Assistant be able to use the cloned system from the FAT32 drive?

 

[Blue Velvet]

No, because the disk needs to be partitioned using the GUID partition scheme — not Master Boot Record — to make it bootable for an Intel Mac.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303220


Edit: Here's a better explanation of how these things work with some caveat.

Partition schemes apply disk-wide (GUID/APM/MBR). File system FORMAT is per individual partition. You can use FAT32 format on one of the partitions that you want to share with msWindows machines (and HFS+ for the other), but I would recommend checking out if it works on the Windows machines you have (WinXP recognized it fine when I tried a GUID patritioned disk with a FAT32 partition) - if not, you'll need something like MacDrive (or GPT Mounter).

You should consider using the full 120GB for for the bootable backup, but if you think You'll only use say 95 GB of the internal HD before upgrading it, then a partition slightly bigger than that size should be sufficient for the bootable backup. The backup program should tell you if you have allocated an insufficient size for the existing data.

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6139670

 

[Greg_C]

Thanks for the quick reply and links! So I understand it won't be bootable, but do you have any idea if Migration Assistant might be able to make use of it?