. Four Kinds of Installation The Mac OS X installer can perform a number of different installations. For example, it can put a copy of Mac OS X onto a hard drive that currently has: | . Four Kinds of Installation The Mac OS X installer can perform a number of different installations. For example it can put a copy of Mac OS X onto a hard drive that currently has Nothing on it. If you one day have to erase your hard drive completely because it s completely hosed or less drastically because you ve bought a new empty external hard drive this is how to do it. See Erase Install on Section for a step-by-step guide. Mac OS 9. See The Basic Installation on the facing page for a step-by-step explanation. Your old Mac OS 9 System Folder will still be there after the installation but it won t do you much good. Classic doesn t exist anymore and the only Leopard-compatible Macs that can restart into Mac OS 9 are a handful of pre-2003 G4 models. Mac OS X through . The Leopard installer can turn your older copy of Mac OS X into the version in the process maintaining all of your older preferences fonts documents accounts and so on. See The Upgrade Installation on Section . POWER USERS CLINIC The Partitioning Question Before you install Leopard you might want to confront the issue of partitioningyour Mac s hard drive dividing its surface so that it shows up on your desktop with two different icons and two different names. You can keep Mac OS 9 on one if you have a G5 pre-Intel machine and Mac OS X on the other. For that matter you can keep Leopard on one and Tiger on the other. Now you can live like a king enjoying all the advantages of people who have two separate hard drives. As a bonus the Mac even comes with a partitioning program Disk Utility. And it no longer requires first erasing the drive completely you can re-partition on the fly without disturbing whatever is already on the drive. For details see Section . On the other hand a substantial body of evidence specifically hundreds of moaning Mac fans online points to the wisdom of performing a clean install rather than an upgrade installation. Apple calls the clean .
