2 drives - 2 OS's

Hi All - first post here.

I have a G5 tower with 2 hard drives - a 250 and 500 GB. The 250 has 10.4.8 installed - the 500 has no OS on it. For compatibility reasons, I need to keep 4.8 running, but I would like to be able to boot into 10.5 if I wanted.

Is it possible to install 10.4.8 on the empty 500 GB drive, up grade to 10.5, and then just select my boot drive when I turn the computer on? Any dangers or pitfalls I should look out for here?

This may be a simple of obvious question - but any advice would be greatly appreciated!

thanks a lot,
Adam

No pitfalls, and you can choose the OS you want to boot to, but why install 10.4.8 and then upgrade to 10.5 on the empty HD, instead of just installing 10.5?
Am I missing something here?

Ahhh ....you want to install tiger onto your empty drive, and leopard onto your 250.
I got you (am a bit tired, and reading your post was like a bit of a riddle)
but still, once again, no pitfalls.... you'll just have the 2 OS's to boot from

No, he wants to keep Tiger on the 250, and Leopard (or Snow Leopard) on the new 500.

Yes, you can. But you don't have to upgrade. If you have a Leopard Upgrade DVD, it will do a new install also. But it won't include iLife - you have to install that separately.

Insert the Leopard DVD and boot. It will give you the choice of where to install Leopard - pick the 500GB drive, and Bob's Your Uncle.

After the install is done - you can pick which OS to boot by holding down the <option> key when you hear the chime. You will see the two different OS disks - pick one.

FYI: Depending on your application, you can install Tiger (or Leopard or Snow Leopard) on a USB key using the same technique. Tiger will fit on 8GB stick and Snow Leopard fits on a 16GB stick. If a majority of the 250GB is data - move it to the new Leopard disk for storage. Then use the USB Tiger "disk" to boot from. It's a little slow to boot, but if all of the Apps and data are on a real HD, it gets faster. It gives you options.