Installing Tiger on External Hard Drive will erase my data?

Hello there!
I've installed Leopard on my internal hard drive and as there are some applications that will not work with it I'm thinking of installing Tiger on an external hard drive and boot from there when I need. BUT, this hard drive has information on it that I don't want to erase.
Will the "Install Mac Os X" option (or something like that) keep my files stored on the external hard drive?
Hope this make sense.
Thank you for your help!
Julieta

See if the Archive and Install feature, can be used...
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107120
As long as the info on the external is in folders that have names that aren't going to get replaced, you'll be OK if you don't Erase & Install.

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