Steps to upgrade to Leopard 10.5 using an external drive

First of all, a MacBookPro will not boot from and external firewire drive. It will, however, boot from an external USB drive.  So you will need an external USB case, or better still a combined USB/Firewire case.

You should be aware that getting the old drive out of the MBP is not an easy proposition.  If you google for "MacBook Pro replace drive" should should find some instructions.

Assuming you are still brave enough to proceed, open the MBP, put the old drive into the external case and put the new one into the MBP. Boot from the Leopard install disk by holding down down the c key. Once you see a menubar at the top, pull the Disk Utility menu down and use Disk Utility  to initialize the new drive as Mac Extended Format (HFS+) Journalled, then install Leopard.

At some point in the install you will be asked whether you have another Mac you want to copy programs and settings from and at that point you should connect the external drive, preferrably by the firewire port. All your programs and settings except those incompatible with Leopard will be copied to your hard drive.

Then run Software Updates to update your computer with all the Apple updates.

You should then be able to boot from Leopard on the internal hard drive for from Tiger by connecting the external drive with a USB cable and booting while holding down the option key to bring up the boot picker utility.

You sure about that??   I just did a search and first item that came up says the opposite...
This is from the www.everymac.com site...

In a nutshell, Intel-based systems, like the MacBook Pro, can boot from external Firewire drives, and can boot from external USB drives as well, provided that the drive is formatted appropriately (GPT) and a compatible version of MacOS X is installed. Nevertheless, as Apple does not appear officially to support booting from non-Firewire external drives using MacOS X, it probably is wise to use Firewire.

Sorry, I don' t see where on that page it refers to booting from a firewire drive. Apple's official position, I believe, is that PPC Macs boot only from firewire external drives and Intel Macs only from external USB drives.

I boot my iMac and MacBook without any problem from Firewire. To restore your personal data and applications you can use the installation wizard of Leopard, if you have your old system on the external harddrive (this definately works with a time machine backup, I think it will also work if you use the orgininal disk, but I have never done that). Alternatively you can use superduper which is free for that simple purpose. I never used CarbonCopy, but as far as I know it should work, too. In that case you boot from the external disk and copy from there to your installed disk. Afterwards you upgrade to Leopard. Note, that this will take several hours.

Thanks, that makes more sense...

I'm looking to FIRST have an "external" 320GB(new) firewire and CLONE my internal to that, and do all the upgrading to the EXTERNAL drive (gives me the option to trash it, and whereever I am in the process, just yank it, and take my still perfectly working MBP with my 160GB inside.  

Once I'm happy with the results (i will do the testing and upgrading (to the external at night at home, so I can continue to work normally during the day... and then, when all tested ok, have my internal and external swapped.

So I'm looking for a top-to-bottom keeping this in mind, and want to make sure nothing will trash my internal drive in the process.

Also, I'd prefer to use CCC if possible...

You may be right. My information may be out of date in that respect.

I would advise against cloning your existing volume to the external and then installing Leopard over top of the existing Tiger installation.

You will get a much cleaner installation if you cleanly install Leopard on a fresh drive and use the migration manager to copy over your data and settings.

You can always clone back from the external if you decide not to go with Leopard on the internal.

So I'm throwing these steps out for comment:
(see ?? for questions/comments needing help please)...
-Shut off MBP
-Insert Firewire drive
-Insert Leopard DVD
-Boot from DVD
-??I'm assuming I can do a fresh install and there will be some kind of ??  "migration manager" option to do the install, and it will bring some of my essential settings/files from my internal drive
-Once done, ??SOMEHOW boot from this new Leopard on the external drive (how??)
-Re-install any applications (eg OFFICE, Fusion, etc.......
-Copy documents, vm's etc from the internal to the external

Here is my preference:

Open the MBP. Put the new drive in the MBP and the old drive in the external enclosure.

Boot from the Leopard DVD, intialize the new drive and install Leopard. During the installation process you will be asked if you want to copy settings. At that point, connect the external with the old drive in it. This should cause all your documents and settings to be copied to the new internal drive.

You will then have Leopard on the internal new drive and Tiger on the external old drive, with the same files and settings.

But this will interfere with my work (I don't want that)... so i'm hoping I can do the same
thing, but reverse the process... install the drive AFTER all the work is done.... I need to install all of my software etc, on my own time, at home.... and keep using my machine as normal, during the day (so leave the external at home and work on it during the evenings)... any problems with doing that?  (are you hinting to that this won't work?)... if not... why not??

If that won't work, then how about cloning the disk (using CCC) and doing the same thing, but to the same drive... will that work (a fresh install with an "in-place upgrade")....  

I need to stress the order... i can't mess with the internal drive until the external is ready to go, and then do a quick swap of the drives...  it's critical I have my internal drive working 100% as is until I have the 2nd drive "up to speed"... I can't change that, so I need to have a process that works in that order... please.

It worked to install OSX onto the external firewire hard drive, then do a migrate (users and settings)... then boot the new drive, then do updates, etc.  This is where I'm at, so I'm assuming the swap of int and ext hdd will go fine.