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solmaker · Jul 18, 2007, 07:23 PM

I'm thinking of upgrading the OS on my perfectly serviceable TiBook 1GHz running OS X 10.2.8. How would I go about installing Tiger (or later Leopard) as an alternate boot option, without disturbing my existing 10.2.8 and OS9 boot configurations?

analogika · Jul 18, 2007, 07:30 PM

To be honest, I *really* wouldn't bother maintaining 10.2.8.

It's awfully slow and extremely limited in comparison to 10.4 on the same machine, and your OS 9 / Classic setup will be completely unaffected if you upgrade to 10.4

Cold Warrior · Jul 18, 2007, 08:22 PM

No kidding. 10.2 is backwards compared to 10.4.

jmiddel · Jul 18, 2007, 08:25 PM

Leopard is coming out in about 3 months, why not wait 'till then and get the newest and best?

Sherman Homan · Jul 18, 2007, 08:43 PM

Ditto the above on 10.2. Unless you have some compelling reason to keep it. Then you would have to physically partition the drive to keep multiple systems. That would mean complete backups, reformats and reinstalls. Unless you want to walk the wire with soft partitions...

analogika is right, System 9 will be happy with 10.4.
The debate about waiting for 10.5 versus 10.4.10 is not going to be resolved. I would vote for 10.4 Tiger simply because it is time to upgrade and the first install of the first version of 10.5 Leopard is going to be really fun to watch from the sidelines with a working computer!

reader50 · Jul 18, 2007, 08:45 PM

Originally Posted by solmaker

... How would I go about installing Tiger (or later Leopard) as an alternate boot option, without disturbing my existing 10.2.8 and OS9 boot configurations?

You would need to add an external drive, or repartition your internal drive. While OS9 can have multiple System Folders on a partition, OSX can have only one working install on a partition.

If you wanted to partition the internal drive, iPartition seems to be the best utility available. Or you could upgrade the internal to a larger, newer drive. Partition it, then clone your existing drive onto one partition of the new drive.

mduell · Jul 18, 2007, 09:02 PM

Originally Posted by analogika

To be honest, I *really* wouldn't bother maintaining 10.2.8.

It's awfully slow and extremely limited in comparison to 10.4 on the same machine, and your OS 9 / Classic setup will be completely unaffected if you upgrade to 10.4

Depends on how much RAM you have. If you don't have much, 10.4 is glacial compared to 10.2 or 10.3.

Simon · Jul 19, 2007, 03:34 AM

Even if 10.4 requires more RAM compared to 10.3 (which I'm not so sure of), there's IMHO no reason to stick with 10.2. I've seen substantial performance increases on old Macs when you update form 10.2 to 10.3.

But to answer the OP's original question: Pay for iPartition or repartition manually. That means: clone your entire disk to an external disk. Repartition the internal drive. Clone back your OS 9 and 10.2.8 stuff to your internal disk. Install 10.4 on one of the new partitions.

You can clone with /Applications/Utilities/DiskUtility > Restore.

solmaker · Jul 19, 2007, 01:52 PM

Thanks for all the great information and suggestions. Back when Panther/Tiger were released, I'd read several upgrade horror stories, which recommended doing a clean install instead of upgrading on top of 10.2.8. I hadn't realized the Mac was limited to only one OS X version, since it already has OS 9, but it makes sense since I need separate partitions for multi-boot configurations on my office PCs.

Questions:
1) At this point, can I disregard the old horror stories, and expect to be able to upgrade to 10.4 with impunity?
2) My TiBook 1GHz runs fine with its 1Gb of memory, but would this be a problem for 10.4 or 10.5? What would be the best OS for this older configuration?
3) When 10.5 is released, will the price for 10.4 drop like a stone (or conversely, would this old OS now suddenly be unavailable)?

analogika · Jul 19, 2007, 02:42 PM

1) Yes.

2) Should run excellently with 10.4, and well with 10.5.

3) 10.4 will no longer be available new, but used pricing for boxed copies should drop like a stone.

reader50 · Jul 19, 2007, 02:45 PM

1) I upgraded from 10.2.8 to 10.4 shortly after it came out. There were minimal issues. I'm not sure if "impunity" is the right word, but if you are backed up, nothing critical should go wrong.
2) 1 GB is good, including for Tiger. Unless your typical applications are RAM hogs, and don't want to spare any for the OS.
3) Unknown. I'd expect Tiger to go down some, certainly in used packages.

Sherman Homan · Jul 19, 2007, 07:54 PM

Ditto the above posts, but: the value of Tiger install disks may well hold up as people like you update older systems. Depends on what Apple decides is the minimum hardware requirement. If 10.5 runs on any PPC or Intel chipped Mac, then the Tiger disks will be very cheap. But if the requirement is a 600 MHz or faster G4 then the Tiger disks may be worth a lot more.

solmaker · Jul 20, 2007, 10:30 PM

Again, thanks!

1) Any real reason to go to the trouble of a clean install versus an update install?

2) Sounds like it's possible 10.5 may run slower than 10.4 on my machine... but that's speculation at this point. When/where might I find comparative benchmark tests of 10.5 versus 10.4 running on older hardware?

analogika · Jul 21, 2007, 03:37 AM

Originally Posted by solmaker

2) Sounds like it's possible 10.5 may run slower than 10.4 on my machine...

Very unlikely, knowing Apple - provided you have enough RAM.

Every major iteration of Mac OS X so far has performed noticeably smarter than the previous version on the same hardware, but required somewhat more memory.

Simon · Jul 21, 2007, 03:44 AM

Originally Posted by analogika

Every major iteration of Mac OS X so far has performed noticeably smarter than the previous version on the same hardware, but required somewhat more memory.

QFT. Although some people like spreading the contrary (maybe because on Windows it's always been that way) in my experience newer OS X versions have always performed better then the versions they replaced. Of course provided, as analogika mentioned, you have enough RAM. Fortunately RAM is really cheap right now.

solmaker · Jul 21, 2007, 08:21 PM

"Provided you have enough RAM" and "required somewhat more memory" is the kicker. My 1GHz 1Gb TiBook works fine but is a 5-year-old machine that's long out of warranty. I'm intending to buy a new MacBook[Pro] when the time is right, but for now my TiBook continues to serve my purposes... but I don't see much point in putting more memory into a machine that could kick out at any time (possibly even during memory installation).

Should 1 Gb be "enough" memory to provide enhanced performance in 10.50 vs 10.40? (And BTW, is "Classic" mode going to disappear in 10.50?)

Thanks again for the input, guys!

chris v · Jul 21, 2007, 08:24 PM

Originally Posted by solmaker

Again, thanks!
1) Any real reason to go to the trouble of a clean install versus an update install?

I don't remember the exact circumstances since it's been a year and a half, but I tried to do a simple upgrade to 10.4 on a couple of my machines, and things got gummed up. I don't think you need to do a clean install unless you just feel like starting fresh, but an Archive and Install (preserve user and network settings) should give you a nice clean system,while keeping all your apps and prefs intact, and if there's anything you need from the previous system, then you can dig it out of the previous system folder, if necessary. Just back up all your files first.

himself · Jul 22, 2007, 12:34 AM

I have an old 667MHz TiBook with 1GB of RAM and 10.4.10 installed, and it runs incredibly. The only kicker is Dashboard, which uses large amounts of memory and will have your machine paging in and out in no time. The machine still performs really well anyway, but it can be annoying waiting for the spinning beachball while the memory gets swapped around. My advice would be to avoid Dashboard on your TiBook unless you absolutely need it. But the upgrade is definitely worth it.

solmaker · Jul 22, 2007, 12:34 AM

>Archive and Install (preserve user and network settings) should give you a nice clean system,while keeping all your apps and prefs intact,...

Thanks, chris v - sounds like a good plan! BTW, when your 10.4 upgrades got gummed up, what did you do to unstick them?

analogika · Jul 22, 2007, 05:17 AM

Originally Posted by solmaker

"Provided you have enough RAM" and "required somewhat more memory" is the kicker. My 1GHz 1Gb TiBook works fine but is a 5-year-old machine that's long out of warranty. I'm intending to buy a new MacBook[Pro] when the time is right, but for now my TiBook continues to serve my purposes... but I don't see much point in putting more memory into a machine that could kick out at any time (possibly even during memory installation).

Should 1 Gb be "enough" memory to provide enhanced performance in 10.50 vs 10.40? (And BTW, is "Classic" mode going to disappear in 10.50?)

Thanks again for the input, guys!

1 GB is certainly enough to let 10.4 run circles around 10.2.

Depending on what you'll be doing, I suspect this will be the case for 10.5 as well.

solmaker · Jul 30, 2007, 01:46 AM

Success! Here's my report:

I upgraded from 10.2.8 to 10.4.6 using Archive and Install (preserving user and network settings). Installation succeeded without a hitch (except the final part of the optional Xcode Tools Java installation was glacially slow to complete). Likewise no problem installing the web update from 10.4.6 to 10.4.10 (though again the concomitant Java downloads and installs were interminable).

I've been extremely pleased with the rock-solid, snappy performance of Tiger compared to my stable but somewhat pokey old Jaguar installation. It's wonderful having the door opened so I can use the latest stuff (such as much-needed upgrades to iTunes and Safari).

But what I was most astounded by was that ALL my old stuff has worked so far without ANY manual fiddling by yours truly (with one minor exception) - despite not doing an "Update" type install. Everything's been cool: all my applications, my existing network connections, old printers (plus new printers that were automatically detected across the network), Internet programs, Virtual PC, Classic, dual boot to OS9, etc.

The only minor exception was that Stuffit Expander wasn't working because of a missing file. But I had already learned from my Internet research that this was a known problem that's easily corrected by copying the /Library/CFMSupport folder from /Previous Systems into the the new /Library folder, which worked like a charm.

I had been concerned that my 1Gb of memory might be suboptimal for Tiger, and in particular that Dashboard might use so much memory that it could lead to continual page thrashing. And indeed, when Tiger booted for the first time, I could hear the hard drive working in the background continuously. So I researched how to turn off Dashboard Widgets which I could see in Activity Monitor were grabbing a lot of memory. But even so, the hard drive kept working... until it finally stopped after about 20-30 minutes. My guess is that Spotlight was doing an initial index of my hard drive (though I'm not sure how I feel about that... I wasn't real keen on MS Word doing this with its idiotic so-called "Fast Find" feature back in the day...). But things have quieted down considerably ever since, and my new OS has been working solidly and swiftly ever since.

Thanks to all you posters above for your help leading to this very happy conclusion!

analogika · Jul 30, 2007, 01:56 PM

(and yes, that was Spotlight indexing - you could have checked by looking at the Spotlight icon: when it's indexing, there's a small white dot pulsating in the magnifying glass and the menu shows index status when you click it)

Try Unarchiver instead of StuffIt - StuffIt has become increasingly annoying and cumbersome over the years, and I have yet to come across a file that Unarchiver won't decompress - including password-protected ones. Exception: encrypted .rar files, best handled by UnRarX anyway.