Upgrade - Should I worry about boot camp or Fusion being corrupted?

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I didn't see this addressed. I looked, but I didn't see it.

MBP, 2GB RAM, 160GB HD. Running 10.5.8 - pretty reliable and up to date.
VMWare Fusion 2.0.6 (basically stable - upgraded last Friday),
Leopard version of boot camp (2.0 ?) with Windows XP (reliable, but still, Windows).

I bought the 10.6 upgrade on Saturday, and it occurs to me "If I lose my VMWare system, my boot camp machine as well as render my MBP unusable, I am well and truly f****d." Not so much the data, I've got all of that saved - but the time to get everything working again. I could be down for 3 or 4 days as I rebuild - and I can't afford that.

The upgrade from Tiger to Leopard didn't go well for me. Rather than fight it, I decided to use it as an opportunity to upgrade to a 160GB HD and loaded Leopard from scratch. I can't afford that kind of down time this time around.

So, I have questions:
1) Does the upgrade process "mess" with my boot camp partition? Assuming it doesn't, will I have to run some kind of upgrade script on my WinXP boot camp system to upgrade the boot camp utilities on the WinXP system?
I haven't read any horror stories about folks losing boot camp partitions - so I assume it's safe. But, I thought I'd ask.

2) Do I have to reinstall VMWare Fusion? Or, for that matter, any of the other apps I have loaded? I know there may be advantages to reloading certain apps - 32-bit vs. 64-bit - but: Do I HAVE to reload?

3) What's the best "pre-installation / pre-upgrade" preparation?
Backup your data?
Cross your fingers?
Image a new HD with the old HD before you upgrade?
I was actually thinking about this last one: Image a new disk from the original HD and upgrade using the new disk. That way, if everything goes south, I snap in the original disk and I'm ready to get back to work.

Yeah, yeah - I know: Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Spoken like a true hobbiest.

If something screws up, not only do I lose time, but I look like a loon - "Why not just use Vista like the rest of us?" is the typical refrain I get from around the office. I am my own Mac support group.
So, I don't want to end up with a big, smoking hole in my foot instead of a working machine when I try this upgrade.

In other words: I have time to prep for an upgrade - I don't have time to fix problems after a botched upgrade.
I could spend weeks getting ready, as long as the upgrade is complete and successful in a weekend.

Any comments?
 
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I'm not sure what you use your mac and vm fusion for.. But I can tell you my experience. First let me give you a run down on my situation.

I have a macbook pro 17" 2.93 unibody with 4gb. I'm a front end web developer and use CS4 (usually just Photoshop), vm fusion with (xp pro, vs 2003, vs 2008, Aptana, firefox and ie6) and (win7, ie8 and firefox), Aptana, Entourage, ichat and itunes, all day long. And also Time Machine; thank god.

Before the upgrade, I backed up my system. And I took note of my free hd and ram. I had around 1 gb free of ram. After the upgrade... I had 10mb! I couldn't do anything, except constant restarts. Running 2 VM window instances really crippled my computer now. And to top it off, Cisco VPN Client no longer worked.

Needless to say, when I got home from work.. I put the snow leopard disk back in and went to the utilities section, then to restore from Time Machine. That took about 2 hours. But everything is back to normal. Nothing was left messed up.

To sum it up, just make sure you do a back up first. And you should be fine with the new os; if all you do is use a few programs at the same time. Like a web browser and text editor.
 

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