Upgrade from Tiger to Leopard. How to handle upgrading external drives?

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Level 1

19 points

Upgrade from Tiger to Leopard. How to handle upgrading external drives?

So I recently installed Leopard on my laptop, but I have an external drive still formatted for Tiger and am going to be getting another external very soon. I've never done this so I'm not sure how to get the data off of the external drive I've already got in order to reformat it? There isn't enough room on my laptop to hold the data during formating, so what do I do with the data while prepping the two external hard drives? Am I just way over-thinking this?

Thanks in advance
Dan

PowerBook G4 1Ghz 15inch, Mac OS X (10.5.8)

Posted on Nov 8, 2009 9:12 PM

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Answer 1

Nov 8, 2009 9:43 PM in response to Starboard V

Hello Dan:

Am I just way over-thinking this?

IMHO, yes.

Your external drive is probably formatted as Apple Partition Map and the volumes are probably Mac OS extended (journaled). You can check that in disk utility.

A drive that is readable in OS X 10.4 should certainly be readable in OS X 10.5 (or OS X 10.6). You should not need to do anything at all.

Barry

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Answer 2

V.K.

Level 9

56,192 points

Nov 9, 2009 6:12 AM in response to Starboard V

as barry says, you don't need to do anything at all with your external drives. All versions of OS X use the same drive formats - mac os extended.

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Answer 3

Starboard V Author

Level 1

19 points

Nov 9, 2009 7:22 AM in response to V.K.

So if I want to use Time Machine to back up both the laptop and the external drive onto another external drive, neither external has to be formatted to 10.6?

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Answer 4

Nov 9, 2009 8:21 PM in response to Starboard V

Hello s:

This article describes drive formats for Time Machine backups:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.6/en/15139.html

Barry

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