Installing OSX twice on the same machine?

I have my Mac setup more or less how I want it, but I also want to do some rather experimental tweaking, and I'm thinking to install OSX on one of the other hard disks so I don't mess up my 'normal' computer.

Although it's probably easy enough to 'try it and see', before I start shifting big blocks off data around to empty a disk, is it as simple as I imagine it will be - I'll be able to hold the option key at startup and choose which hard disk to boot off of?

Thanks.

Pretty much. Personally, I like to do a Superduper backup of my hard drive, make it bootable and then use that as a "sandbox". It's much easier than installing to an external drive.

cwa107 said:

Pretty much. Personally, I like to do a Superduper backup of my hard drive, make it bootable and then use that as a "sandbox". It's much easier than installing to an external drive.

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OK, thanks. I just have data on the intended victim at the moment, I'll shift that off to another drive.

I use silverkeeper for backups. So far, drama free. I like it.

jonnyd said:

OK, thanks. I just have data on the intended victim at the moment, I'll shift that off to another drive.

I use silverkeeper for backups. So far, drama free. I like it.

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Check out Superduper! - the standard version is free. If you want incremental backups, it's $27 - and it works fine with Tiger. The nice thing is that it does an exact clone of your hard drive and makes it bootable on the fly. If you ever have a system drive failure, recovery is as easy as booting off the drive you cloned to.

cwa107 said:

Check out Superduper! - the standard version is free. If you want incremental backups, it's $27 - and it works fine with Tiger. The nice thing is that it does an exact clone of your hard drive and makes it bootable on the fly. If you ever have a system drive failure, recovery is as easy as booting off the drive you cloned to.

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I shall take a look. Now you mention it I'm thinking I might actually clone the current startup disk and strip that down, rather than build a new one from the ground up. That could actually save a lot of time.

Thanks a lot, appreciate your help.