Mac os 10.4 & windows on external drive

Hi All,
Back to mac after ~ 18 years so some things are "new" to me. I would like to install os 10.4 and windows on an external drive, while leaving 10.5.1 (I own full copies of each) on my macbook and be able to choose which to boot from. Is this possible? If so is a USB external or firewire required?
Thanks,
Carl

Hi,
You say
while OSX can easily be installed and booted from an external HD,
Stefan
Well I thought it should be easy, but I must be missing something. I bought a 100GB HD for a laptop that didn't turn out to need it, so I thought it would be good to install 10.4.11 on it so I could use it to start up coomputers having HD problems. I put it into a USB "slim carrier", plugged it into my iBook, put the install disk into the superdrive and clicked install. When the iBook re-started and the installation steps showed up, the drive showed up, but the install program showed the drive as a non-installable location.
Is there another way to do this? Must it be in a firewire enclosure, or should USB work?
Many thanks for any hints here,
...Tom

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PaulHand wrote:
I have a LaCie 1 T external drive. I want to use it to backup both my Mac partition and my Windows 7 partition. The Windows 7 partition was created using Bootcamp. I formatted the drive with exfat from within Lion and then divided the drive into two equal partitions, one for Mac and one for PC. I tried to use Time Machine to back up the Mac data and it seemed to blow away the Mac partition which is no longer visible to Finder and consequently cannot be backed up to. I haven't tried to do anything about backing up the Windows 7 partition. As an aside, one online source I saw said I need to do this setup routine of the external drive from within Windows 7 in order for the drive to be accessible to both operating systems?
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Dave Sawyer wrote:
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Hi,
Thanks.
It is running 10.5.8.
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ssc

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Hello,
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Hilal Malawi wrote:
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