before I upgrade

Someone gave you goofy instructions. Just do the following:

Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions

Boot from your Tiger Installer disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu. After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list. In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive. If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported click on the Repair Permissions button. Wait until the operation completes, then quit DU and return to the installer.

If DU reports errors it cannot fix, then you will need Disk Warrior and/or Tech Tool Pro to repair the drive. If you don't have either of them or if neither of them can fix the drive, then you will need to reformat the drive and reinstall OS X.

Now quit the installer to restart the computer. After you restart eject the Tiger disc from the optical drive. Insert the Leopard DVD then do the following:

Booting From An OS X Installer Disc

1. Insert OS X Installer Disc into the optical drive.

2. Restart the computer.

3. Immediately after the chime press and hold down the "C" key.

4. Release the key when the spinning gear below the dark gray Apple logo

appears.

5. Wait for installer to finish loading.

When the installer has loaded follow the onscreen instructions until you have to select a destination drive. Click once on the drive then click on the Option button. Choose Upgrade from the list of options and click on the OK button. Now click on the Install button.

I would recommend you backup your Tiger system before installing Leopard just in case there is a problem. You will need an external drive for the backup that can be erased:

Clone using Restore Option of Disk Utility

1. Open Disk Utility in the Utilities folder.

2. Select the destination volume from the left side list.

3. Click on the Restore tab in the DU main window.

4. Select the destination volume from the left side list and drag it to the Destination

entry field.

5. Select the source volume from the left side list and drag it to the Source entry field.

6. Check the box to Erase the Destination drive before cloning.

7. Double-check you got it right, then click on the Restore button.

Destination means the external backup drive. Source means the internal startup drive.

1. Yes, but as it's the computer's only display, leave it connected; iMacs, eMacs, and portables have built-in monitors.

2. No. All keyboards will work at a basic level, but any driver software needed for full functionality may need to be updated as well.

3. Ignore that recommendation.

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No, you can't drag those folders. If you don't want to erase the existing data on that drive, clone to a disk image on it, or use the Disk Utility on the Mac OS X 10.5 DVD to partition the drive so there's a blank one available to hold the clone, or buy another external HD.

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As Niel has said, either partition the external hard drive with enough space to clone your internal drive or get qnother external hard drive.