Can Tiger be installed on a formatted drive without losing data?

i have a mac OS formatted drive with tons of data on it that i use as a secondary storage device. my main HD just burnt out, and i was thinking of installing Tiger to the secondary drive. i know that if you install OS X on a drive that already has a previous version of the OS on it, you have the option to 'archive and install,' but this is not an option since the drive has no OS files on it. so my question is, if i choose the standard option of 'install OS X' from the install disk, will i lose my data from the drive?

As long as the drive was initialized as HFS+ (Mac Extended) you can install OSX without erasing the disk, but if that disk contains your only copy of important data you would be living dangerously. If something goes wrong (user error, software bug, power surge, hardware failure, etc.) you could lose everything.

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