New to SD - format recommendations

[Larry Estes]

Let me tell you what worked for me:

I have a G5 2.5 GHZ Tower (purchased Oct. 2004) and a MacBook Pro (purchased Oct. 2007) an OWC 500GB FireWire external HD (purchased Nov.2007). The MacBook Pro came installed with Tiger. I immediately partitioned the OWC external HD (APM) and cloned the Tower and the MacBook Pro to separate volumes on the OWC external using SD. Then I partitioned the MacBook Pro into 2 volumes, 1 for Tiger and 1 for Leopard. I then cloned Tiger (back form the external) to the MacBook Pro and when Leopard came out I installed it on the Tower and the MacBook Pro and made clones of both onto the OWC external (using Carbon Copy Cloner). Because of my fooling around with Leopard on the MacBook Pro I had to do a reinstall, actually cloned back from the OWC external to the MacBook Pro (CCC again) and all went well.

The Tower is formatted APM.
The OWC external is formatted APM.
The MacBook Pro is formatted GUID.

I can boot from any volume on the external and of course the Tower and the MacBook Pro.

This procedure is working for me!