G5 PPC runing 10.4.11 - need to move to 10.5.8 - guidelines? Tips?

Hi Klaus1 - thanks for the reply.

At present my external firewire drive - is not bootable - because it presently lacks a full O/S. CCC can't copy the O/S to an external hard drive - when the O/S is in use on the desktop system. So you have to install an O/S from a disc.. Yes/No?

In researching this - I saw that 10.4 had to be installed on a partitioned drive, at least all the directions I found seemed to indicate that - due to some limit on the size of the volume it could address. I did not find any information related to 10.5 - that specified one way or the other - if it too had to have a limited volume. I did not originally partitiion the external hard drive that I am using for CCC Backup's..

I would like to run 10.5.8 on an external bootable drive - so I can see how several of my existing applications run there, or see if I need to get updates to them before starting to change things on my desktop computer. Secondly, I want to have a bootable drive for my system back up.. so that if my internal drive fails ect - I can switch drives and continue daily activities..

So my thought was to install 10.5.8 on the external firewire drive - first. Use it there, check everything out. Then if everything is OK - install 10..5.8 on my desktop computer.

Hi Klaus1

Thanks for the reply. I did not realize you could copy an O/S while it was in use - thanks for the correction.

I successfully updated the OS on the external hard drive to 10.5.6 - from a DVD. The drive however would still not boot my G5.

Turns out that my OWC-Mercury Elite AL Pro - 1TB drive, was wired incorrectly. To run properly with the Mac G5 PPC - the drive interface board has to be limited to address no more than 2.2TB. Even if it is hooked to a 1TB hard drive.

On newer models there is a red switch inside that needs to be set to Position 1 - on the drive I received the setting is hard wired in. No Switch. So I'm returning the drive to OWC for repair...

This is a real bummer - because the reason I bought that drive was because it was advertised as being set up to act as a Firewire boot drive to work with the PPC G5 at 10.3 or better. Can't tell how many hours I've spent trying to find out what was wrong...

At any rate - I'll have another drive here in a few days - and we'll see how that goes. I plan to use CCC to copy the data from the first drive - to the new one. In which case the new one should act as a Boot Drive. {fingers crossed}.

I will mention for others that might read this thread - it is important to keep in mind that Disks are Partitioned - - and Volumes use both a Partition Type and a File System. It took me too long to understand that and keep the acronyms straight - LOL

Looking at the Get-Info on my hard drive I see

DISK

- Partition Type - Apple Partition Scheme {APS} I think this is also called APM Apple Partition Map.

VOLUME

- Partition Type - Apple HFS

- File System - Mac OS Extended {journaled}

Don't know if that is correct or not - but it matches my internal hard drive settings.

FWIW,

Carl