[Virtualacorn-list] Dual Booting MacOS 10.4/10.5

[Paul Morrison]

Curiosities:-

Had a nasty and terminal crash on my G4 15in Powerbook. As I had the  
original instal discs for OS 10.3 (Panther) and the upgrade for 10.4  
(Tiger) I saw no big issues with a clean instal. (I was not then  
aware of the RAM issues which throw up problems with the instal  
disc). The instal disc came back as corrupted. I tried going back to  
my local Apple dealer who assured me that Leopard would instal  
without any trouble. This was true but 75% of the Apple applications  
I use weren't Leopard compatible. Virtual Acorn is excellent by the  
way -- none of the networking issues that existed under Tiger, once I  
sorted the firewall. Before I started installing Leopard I  
partitioned the laptop's hard disc.
Irritated with Leopard, I came across the RAM thread -- it seems that  
even a very small mismatch in RAM strips can throw the installation  
off. I used the disc utility on my Mac mini, and the instal discs  
were perfect. So, I took out one of the RAM strips, and borrowed a  
friend's identical powerbook. Starting mine with the "T" key, I  
plugged in a firewire cable to the other laptop, and, nothing  
ventured, nothing gained, inserted the 10.3 instal disc. It gave me  
three choices of boot disc, my friend's laptop hard disc, the  
partition with Leopard and the empty partition. I chose the empty  
partition and the installation went right through to the familiar  
Panther desktop. Shutting everything down and unplugging the firewire  
cable, I re-started my powerbook holding down the "alt" key. This  
brought up a choice of boot disc. Booting with the Leopard disc  
brought up Leopard, and similarly with Panther, which I then upgraded  
to Tiger, installed Classic, and al of my apps worked.

What has this to do with Virtual Acorn, you ask. Well the surprise is  
that there is no need to copy over Virtual Acorn to the Tiger boot  
drive. It works perfectly happily from the Leopard Drive, although  
operating under OS 10.4.  Is ther some snag I haven't encountered yet?

I am quite sure that techies will tell me that this instal method is  
unstable and I am happy to accept that -- at least I can use my  
computer in the way that I want to, and if it crashes eventually,  
well I'm no worse off. particularly since I back everything up  
regularly.

Thoughts and comments welcome.

Paul