[eddieck]

I've been hearing that some applications may not work on Snow Leopard, so I'm posting this tip so you can keep your existing Leopard installation while having a fresh Snow Leopard installation on another partition. Go into Disk Utility and split your drive into two partitions (three if you are using Boot Camp; not sure if this will work in conjunction with Boot Camp though). The first partition will be your Leopard partition - the second can be your Snow Leopard partition. Since you're going to be removing 10.5 within a few months after software is compatible, you should also run Carbon Copy Cloner and clone your Leopard partition (the 1st one) to the 2nd one so you can install Snow Leopard on the 1st. This is required because of how Disk Utility works; you can probably get around it by using gparted or even a commercial partitioning utility.

[Cold Warrior]

Disk Utility can dynamically repartition the boot drive without data loss, as long as it doesn't have more than 1 partition there already. Then use the Restore feature to clone. No need for CCC or a third-party partition utility.

[besson3c]

How lovely it would be to be able to run SL in a VM for this very reason.

[eddieck]

Originally Posted by Cold Warrior 

Disk Utility can dynamically repartition the boot drive without data loss, as long as it doesn't have more than 1 partition there already. Then use the Restore feature to clone. No need for CCC or a third-party partition utility.

That's the problem. Your Leopard partition is already at the "top" and so you can only add another partition to the "bottom." If you remove the top one, the only solution within Disk Utility is to create another one at the top and CCC the last one to the first one, then remove the last one - at which point you can resize the first one to use all your disk space.

The Restore feature within Disk Utility probably works just as well; I just like CCC.

[eddieck]

Originally Posted by besson3c 

How lovely it would be to be able to run SL in a VM for this very reason.

You can run Snow Leopard Server in VMware Fusion. I'm sure Snow Leopard client could be hacked (possibly illegally?) to run. The major problem is probably the hardware side of things - particularly graphics. VMware Fusion doesn't particularly have good graphics and does not support OpenGL (what OS X uses) at all. I believe VirtualBox and other VMware products (on other OSs) do support OpenGL though - so it's still a possibility.

[Simon]

Originally Posted by eddieck 

The Restore feature within Disk Utility probably works just as well; I just like CCC.

Well simply put, you shouldn't.

CCC and also SD have caused a lot of trouble in the past. People relied on their CCC/SD 'clones' to be well, clones but when they actually need to copy back something they learned that their 'clone' was botched and came crying here. It's happened several times and there are tons of reports on the web. If it has worked for you so far, consider yourself lucky. But stop taking chances.

For clones you should simply rely on what Apple has built into every OS X install. It's way faster than CCC and SD anyway (block copies). It's rock solid, it's very fast and it's of course free. You'll find it on every OS X installer DVD and on every OS X installation.

/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility > Restore.

Select erase destination to get a bootable clone in block-copy mode (fast!).

[Simon]

Regarding the topic of this thread, I think fooling around with your main partition just for fun is not always the best idea. For simply trying out SL you can use any external partition just as well. Clone you Leopard partition to the secondary. Install SL on the primary or secondary (depending on your preference). If you want to go back to Leopard you can always clone back. If you use Disk Utility > Restore with the erase destination flag set you'll get an exact clone that will always remain bootable.

Repartitioning will work, however it's time consuming and a bit dangerous too. Personally, for testing purposes I'd use an external drive and a clone of my main partition. But I wouldn't touch the main partition itself. At least not on a production machine.

[eddieck]

Thanks for the insight! I'm not using CCC anymore. Apple thinking ahead as usual.

[tonewheel]

From Apple, this morning, concerning incompatible and troublesome apps:

Apps which are moved to the separate folder include:

Parallels Desktop, ver. 2.5 and earlier

McAfee VirusScan, ver. 8.6

Norton AntiVirus ver. 11.0

Internet Cleanup 5 ver. 5.0.4

Application Enhancer ver. 2.0.1 and earlier

Unsanity

AT&T Laptop Connect Card ver. 1.0.4, 1.0.5, 1.10.0

launch2net ver, 2.13.0

iWOW plug-in for iTunes ver. 2.0

Missing Sync for Palm Sony CLIE Driver ver. 6.0.4

TonePort UX8 Driver ver. 4.1.0

ioHD Driver ver. 6.0.3

Silicon Image SiI3132 Drivers ver. 1.5.16.0


On top of this, the following software is being blocked from launching:

Parallels Desktop ver. 3.0

VirusBarrier X4 ver. 10.4.4 and earlier

SPSS 17 ver. 17.1

Director MX 2004 ver. 10.2

EyeTV ver. 3.0.0 to 3.1.0

Ratatouille ver. 1.1

Aperture ver. 2.1.1 and earlier

Keynote ver. 2.0.2 and earlier

AirPort Admin Utility for Graphite and Snow ver. 4.2.5


Apple meanwhile notes that a number of Snow Leopard-compatible printer drivers have been released this week, from a variety of companies. These include:

Xerox

Lexmark

Canon

FujiXerox

Epson

HP

Lanier

Gestetner

Gutenprint

Ricoh

Brother

Samsung

NRG

Infotec

Savin

An important change to the operating system is the availability of third-party printer software through Software Update, eliminating the need to manually download drivers from company websites.