What will happen if i install OS X on a separate HD?

[Nvidiaguy07]

Right now im dual booting Vista and Ubuntu on my first Hard drive with no problems. I want to give Leopard a try and i have an extra hard drive that im not using to try it on. I want to just go ahead and install it on that 2nd drive but im not completely sure what will happen. Im guessing that itll just keep booting from the Vista HD even after Leopard is installed. If all i have to do is press F12 and select the 2nd hard drive to boot into Leopard ill be ok with that.

Is this what will happen though?

If not what should i do if i want to do this?

 

[Rottie]

are you going to install on PC not on Apple Mac? I dont know how can Leopard run on PC?

 

[TheStu]

You might want to ask in the Apple section since they would be the most likely source for this info. Check the Hackintosh thread there.

 

[ViRGE]

Installing Mac OS X may overwrite the MBR on your boot drive. If that's the case, you're going to have two issues:

1) You won't be able to boot Mac OS X by trying to boot off of the 2nd drive (the Mac OS X installer will not have written to the MBR on that drive)
2) You won't be able to boot Windows/Ubuntu by trying to boot off of the 1st drive (the Mac OS X installer will have written to the MBR on the 1st drive, causing you to immediately boot in to Mac OS X)

Since you are running Ubuntu, my assumption is that you are already using the Ubuntu bootloader (GRUB). This makes things rather easy to correct. Once you install Mac OS X, regardless of the outcome (whether the MBR is written to the first or second drive), you can manually add an entry for it in to GRUB. This way you can boot whatever OS you'd like without needing to select a different boot drive. Right now GRUB is by far the easiest way to triple-boot.