How to best install a "experiment/dev" copy of OSX on a machine?

[Sean Dempsey]

I want to put a fresh copy of OSX on a separate drive (or partition of a drive) and use it to boot to for testing and experiments with the OS, while leaving my main drive and OSX intact.

Is this something that people often do? And if so, is it as easy and booting from the DVD, installing OSX to my emptry drive, and then using that as the startup disk anytime I want to mess around with it, without risking my "working" install of OSX?

I've got the drives and the room, just wondering if anyone has any experience or advice on this.

Thanks.

 

[gnasher729]

I want to put a fresh copy of OSX on a separate drive (or partition of a drive) and use it to boot to for testing and experiments with the OS, while leaving my main drive and OSX intact.

Is this something that people often do? And if so, is it as easy and booting from the DVD, installing OSX to my emptry drive, and then using that as the startup disk anytime I want to mess around with it, without risking my "working" install of OSX?

I've got the drives and the room, just wondering if anyone has any experience or advice on this.

Thanks.

I have one machine with MacOS 9.2, MacOS X 10.1, 10.2, 10.3 and 10.4 installed. 6 partitions on two harddisks, one is empty for Leopard. No problem at all.

 

[Sean Dempsey]

So it's a no-brainer? I always wanted to with Windows, but the bootup crap and problems always prevented me from actually doing it.

If it's really that easy, I'll definitely give it a try. How slow does the OS perform booting off an external firewire?