I'd like to install FC5 on my Apple PowerBook G4. I would prefer to not have to reformat and partition my hard drive to do this. Has anyone tried this? What do you think?
It is a great idea, actually. I did this exact thing on my MacMini (which I believe is also a G4). What I ended up doing is buying a firewire drive, using DiskTool (I believe) to create a backup of my current system volume, change the boot device to be the firewire drive, reboot (now off of Firewire rather than the internal hard-drive), repartition the internal drive into two partitions (with the first being for MacOS and the rest being for Linux), and then copied the firewire partition back, remarked the internal drive's MacOS partition as the boot boot-drive, and voila! internal drive resized.
Then I just followed the directions in the FC5 Anaconda installer, making sure that I didn't blow away the MacOS partition.
If anything goes wrong, you can always plug that firewire drive back in, press Option-F (I think that is the combo) while booting, and it will boot off firewire instead of the internal device.
Hope this helps. It was off the top of my head. I can point you to more detailed directions, if you need.
Steve
