Wishing to proceed with a big clean-up of my internal HD, I've just purchased an external drive which I duly partitioned and onto which I saved all my data. I thought it would be easy to install OS X Tiger... BUT... the installation aborts half-way through -installation of essential software- with this message: -some errors occured during installation, reboot and try again to install OS X- I've tried several times to no avail.
I use the CDs received in exchage for the DVD as I don't have a DVD player. The CDs are brand new and in good nick.

Would someone have a solution ?

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a) some external drive chipsets won't play

b) it can matter whether it's on firewire or not

c) investigate Carbon Copy Cloner, which will image your boot drive

d) get used to the idea of opening your mac and having more than one drive hanging off it. What model is it? Some make this easy, others really don't. All my current Macs come from Ebay, where they have been sold by exasperated users because they are unreliable. Without fail, this is because their drives are slowly dying and OSX is hopeless at reporting this (other than by crashing). Stick a new drive in and try to get CCC to copy the partitions, and whacko - nice new fast clean mac.

a) some external drive chipsets won't play
I've copied my data on it and it has worked

b) it can matter whether it's on firewire or not

Yes it connected through Firewire

c) investigate Carbon Copy Cloner, which will image your boot drive

I've had a look, but not quite sure weither to use it or not. If I do will I have to partition the disc ?

d) get used to the idea of opening your mac and having more than one drive hanging off it. What model is it? Some make this easy, others really don't. All my current Macs come from Ebay, where they have been sold by exasperated users because they are unreliable. Without fail, this is because their drives are slowly dying and OSX is hopeless at reporting this (other than by crashing). Stick a new drive in and try to get CCC to copy the partitions, and whacko - nice new fast clean mac.

It's a brand new 80 GB SEAGATE.

Even if a drive is connected via Firewire, that does not neccessarily mean it can boot Tiger. It has to say specifically "Boots Tiger" on it for you to be sure.

> I've had a look, but not quite sure weither to use it or not. If I do will I have to partition the disc ?

Well, that brings up another issue. Have you partitioned your new hard drive yet? All new hard drives must have at least one partition on them so you can start storing files. I'm not very familiar with Mac tools, but if you're savvy enough, you can use fdisk (or cfdisk, it's actually easier to use).

Yes I've made 3 partitions thinking I'd use one 45 Gb to save my data, one 15 for OSX X, and last one 15GB for OS 9 (I've been usng OS9 for years and I've stacks of soft and files using OS9). The question now seems to be which partion will CCC copy the internal drive onto?

The question now seems to be which partion will CCC copy the internal drive onto?

Well, I'm not completely sure how to do this, but I would guess you would mount the partition that you wanted to copy your data onto. Mac OS X should automatically mount all recognizable partitions, so CCC should give you the option of which drive to copy to. If you're really worried, you could just try unmounting the other partitions.

everything has to be mounted, is the short answer. CCC has very complete instructions - if you want a backup of your boot partition then the best way is to write an image file on a mounted partition.

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