[ZSS]

I have a b/w desktop with an additional hard drive. I want to instal Panther on the secondary drive. Here's the dumb question...if I install panther on this formatted disk drive, will it erase the data already on it? I know...backing up is always the safest bet, but I don't presently have a way to do that.

[zachs]

Originally posted by ZSS:
I have a b/w desktop with an additional hard drive. I want to instal Panther on the secondary drive. Here's the dumb question...if I install panther on this formatted disk drive, will it erase the data already on it? I know...backing up is always the safest bet, but I don't presently have a way to do that.

Unless you choose the Erase & Install option, no. Just make sure none of your folders at the top level are named "Applications," "Library," etc. (I.e., none of the standard OS X folder names.) so it won't overwrite them.

[SupahCoolX]

As long as that drive is in Mac OS Extended format, you should have no problems installing Panther on there. If it's in a different format, or has some other non-Mac operating system installed, then there might be other considerations.
If that drive already contains another version of OSX, you can choose to do an upgrade, an "Archive & Install" (which is sort of the OSX equivalent of a "clean install"), or an erase & install.