OS X Dual Boot (Snow Leopard and Lion)

Currently I have Snow Leopard installed on my Mac and I'm dual booting Lion from an external HD, which is somewhat of a pain.

Here are my issues, and I'm hoping someone can provide some better solutions

1. Switching between the two OS, currently I'm having to go into system preferences and choose the primary start up disk, either the Mac HD or the external HD, and then restart the computer to get the OS that I want to boot up.

2. When I boot up Lion, it messes with the screen resolution and things look funny, even when I switch back to Snow Leopard.

3. Finally, I'm using a 1tb HD to boot Lion right now, and what I'd like to do is create a partition on the hard drive to use with time machine to back up both OS, can anyone think of a way I can do this for both of the OS?

I'm new to using a Mac, and I'd appreciate it if some of you more "experienced" Mac users could provide some suggestions.

Thanks!

You can do it but frankly it may become confusing to keep everything straight. You would have to add two more partitions to the 1 TB drive making sure at the same time that you didn't overwrite the Lion partition.

In other words, the 1 TB can be divided into three partitions naming them as an example: 1. Lion 2. Lion_BU 3. SL_BU

Each time you run Time Machine from the respective OS, the backups will have to be directed to the correct partition.

The question is why?

If you need SL for occasional use of PowerPC only applications, put SL on the external and Lion on the internal boot drive. As pointed out you are in for a confusing and maybe conflicting time.

Here's my suggestion: get off the fence and PICK ONE. Personally, I would pick the one with a future.