Apple Mac

[Gavin Scott]

After all these months, my boss has reminded me that I still have the G4; so on the spot I said I'll buy it.

I do need to upgrade the OS to tiger, or can't take advantage of the copy of Final Cut Pro I have aquired.

I did a bit of reading, and it suggests the best kind of install is where I archive all my personal files to a *secondary* drive, and then wipe and cleanly install Tiger. From there a wizard will retreive my personal files.

There are business files I must keep - do I really have to get a second drive? Highly inconvenient. What are the chances of catastrophic failure if I choose the "archive and install [without wipe]" installation?

[Sput]

No idea, I'm undeterred from wittering on though! Could you not back stuff up to a networked computer?

[James Hatts]

When upgrading OS X I've always just done a 'normal' upgrade - no wiping the disk, full-scale reinstall, or any of that nonsense. Never had a problem.

[Gavin Scott]

No idea, I'm undeterred from wittering on though! Could you not back stuff up to a networked computer?

I have networked the machine to my windows pc. The apple only gets switched on once in a blue moon - although I'm confident I will use it once I get my software of choice on there.

I need about 18GB (according to the blurb I read on the net) - and whilst I have that available it is on a windows machine. Will that work?

Or I have an external USB drive with various data on it. Will that work even though it is NTFS formatted?

[Gavin Scott]

When upgrading OS X I've always just done a 'normal' upgrade - no wiping the disk, full-scale reinstall, or any of that nonsense. Never had a problem.

Which is the default option, I understand - but every website I read has these men *worrying* that something will go wrong because they have installed 3rd party software.

[MarkN]

Or I have an external USB drive with various data on it. Will that work even though it is NTFS formatted?

IIRC NTFS filesystems are read-only in Mac OS X.