Setting up an external drive before installing Leopard

Question

I have just purchased a new MacBook and a stand alone version of Leopard to put on my iBook. I have an OWC external drive as well. I want to set up the external so that I can have a bootable copy of Tiger and OS9 (my kids need OS9 to run some of their games) The external is configured as MacOS extended right now with no partitions. I am guessing that I should partition this drive with four partitions? One for Tiger, one for OS9, one for Time Machine, and one for other data, music, movies, documents, etc. My question is what would be good sizes for these partitions? Also if I use Carbon Copy to clone my existing OS, is the clone bootable or do I have to do something else to make it bootable? Will it save all my current files too?
I have been reading the discussions group for several hours trying to figure out what steps to take to install Leopard on my iBook so it has the least amount of problems and this is what I have come up with.
1. repair permissions, run Apple Hardware Test, back up my current OS and any other documents, files, etc. using Carbon Copy
2. Install Leopard using Archive and Install option, with save network preferences box checked.
3. repair permissions again after install
4. enjoy Leopard, (hopefully)
Have I left anything out?
thanks in advance for everyone's help.
Jennifer

Answer 1

I believe you can have OS 9 on the same partition as Tiger, and use "classic" to run the kid's games under Tiger. That will prevent you from wasting disk space with to many partitions. I would definitely recommend putting Time Machine on its own dedicated partition as you indicated.
OS 9 can be installed on a single gigabyte. I'd not install OS X on less than 10GB (this would be for Tiger...and I'm assuming it wont be heavily used beyond running the OS 9 games in classic mode). I'd then put as much as you think you can into the Time Machine volume....as a rule of thumb, having the TM volume be double your Leopard installation is plenty, but it really depends on your uses (file size, frequency of creation/editing, etc).
The clone will be bootable if you restore it to a working partition. As a clone, it will "clone" everything on your drive...files and system...everything.
Those install steps seem right to me. The only thing I'd suggest is to give Leopard a "break-in" period where you set up all the system preferences the way you want and let it run (boot it up and shut it down a few times). Run all the applicaitons that came with it (textedit, photobooth, etc) and see if then open and behave corretly. Then move on to third-party applications you've installed and be sure they work as well. When all that's done and things seem to be ok, migrate your files back to the drive if it's needed, though in the archive and install there's teh option to preserve user data, and this will do the copying for you.
One potential problem is if programs behave funky and settings dont get saved, etc., you might have corrupt preference files, in which case try removing the preference files from your ~/Library/Preferences/ folder for the affected applications.
Hope it goes well!