Temporary Tiger for Java 1.5 solution needed

Java 1.5 is now required by financial transactions group I use, and through which I must access my funds, as of January 8.

My current machine is an AGP 450 (sawtooth), happily running 10.3.9, since it’s 1.2GHz upgrade. Hard as it may be for some of you to accept, its primary use has been for graphics — Photoshop, Painter, Illustrator, etc.

OK, so it’s long in the tooth. Consequently, I’ve been waiting for the mac pro 2.8GHz with its promised nVidia GT8800 card to start shipping, with what I understand to be its required Leopard 10.5.2.

At any rate, eeking by for a year now, awaiting the 8-cores, on tightly managed HDs, Tiger seemed to be too much seasoning and not enough meat, to warrant the upgrade. After the new Mac arrives, I plan to continue running Panther and native 9.2.2 — necessary for several very expensive, never updated, and now rare reference software, for everything from anatomy to mathematics.

What to do about TIGER. All I need is a *****-cat version. In fact, all I really need is Java 1.5 ! — and at that, it’s only needed till the new mac arrives.

What to do? What to do?

Aside from an external firewire 250GB, the HDs are miniscule — a 60GB, 30GB, and 45GB attached to an ACARD 6260.

Located 60 miles from nowhere, a 120GB internal from newegg is to arrive here in 4 days, but I don’t have OS 10.4, and feel ill at the prospect of installing over 10.3.9, just to reverse the procedure in a few weeks — and yes, my SuperDuper! backup is already done.

Any creative solutions would be much appreciated.

 

So… I went to three major computer stores to buy a copy of Tiger. None of them had it.
Two tried to sell me a Leopard — one of which said they could order it. Finally, at a local computer “fix-it shop”, a copy was obtained.

After clearing space on one partition, one VOLUME, of a two partition hard drive, ready to install it, I read in "Read Before You Install":
___

• Select “Erase and Install” to erase the destination volume and install a new copy of Mac OS X. If you select this option, you will lose all your files and the software you have installed on the destination volume, so you may want to back it up first. If you
select this option, you can choose the format for the volume. In most cases, choose
Mac OS Extended (Journaled) from the pop-up menu.
_____

Now, before I go ahead, will someone please confirm that Apple means Volume, as opposed to “ENTIRE DISK”, entire hard drive?
There's stuff on the other partition.