I picked up an upgrade copy of Leopard recently.  I wanted to try it out and see if it’s worth the upgrade.  So, I decided to install it on a Firewire drive so that I could dual boot between my current 10.4.11 OS X install and the new one.  That way, if anything doesn’t work, I have a fall back plan and can wait patiently for the fixes to trickle in.

It took me a week, but I cleaned off my drives enough to free up my 262 GB firewire drive.  I partitioned it, formated it, and rebooted with the Leopard DVD.  It booted just fine, checked to make sure there was a version of 10.4 on the machine, found it, and asked me where to install the OS.  But there was a problem, it ONLY showed my internal drive.

Now, I’m pretty sure that my partition tables are right on my newly formated external drive, so I have to wonder, what are they smoking at Apple?  Was this done to somehow protect their OS from illegally being copied?  If so, it’s a pathetic attempt.  I’m determined to install this OS on an external drive and I will do it.

My diabolical plan includes the use of Carbon Copy Cloner which I will use to clone my current boot drive to an image and store it on an external drive.  Then I plan on reformatting my internal hard drive, installing a clean copy of 10.4 (tiger) on it, and upgrading it to 10.5 (leopard). 

Once Leopard is installed, I will boot to an external Firewire drive running OS X 10.4 (tiger) and clone my internal drive to an external partition with Carbon-Copy Cloner.  Hopefully after all that, OS X 10.5 (leopard) will boot from my firewire drive and I can continue my bid to take over the world.  If not, I’ll have to take the How Addicted to Apple Are You? Quiz again knowing I’ll never suggest  anyone buy an apple again.

This is the type of crap you expect working with XP.  What happened?  This isn’t the Apple experience I was introduced to last year?