Ok to copy to smaller destination volume if source volume isn't full?

[sjk]

Originally Posted by dnanian

…, but under Leopard Intel Macs won't show APM copies as bootable, even though they can be selected with Option+power on.

Bootable volumes on my APM drive do show up under System Preferences > Startup Disk on my Mac mini 2009 running 10.5.7. Even the Leopard volume installed from my iMac G5 though I didn't try booting from it.

Copying from APM -> GUID (under Leopard) will work, yes.

I haven't need to do that (yet), but the inverse (GPT -> APM) worked fine yesterday …

I created a single volume GPT sparse bundle disk image, installed Leopard on it from the mini, cloned the volume to the APM drive using SD!, and successfully booted from it. Using the sparse bundle made this much easier/faster than my original plan of creating a temporary standard volume on a GPT drive to do the Intel-bootable install on and copy that to the APM drive would have been.

In addition to the install-to-sparse-bundle discovery I also was able to non-destructively repartition the APM drive using Disk Utility and create the Intel-bootable volume (after running iDefrag Lite on the original PPC-bootable volume, though it could have been slightly faster restoring the recent backup). I found plenty of outdated info about that around the web before deciding to check it myself (having the backup as a safety net).

I've read that some PPC Macs can boot from volumes on GPT drives but suspected my wife's older eMac wouldn't so there was no compelling reason to convert the external backup boot drive from APM to GPT. Now that hardware/software support for APM has improved for Intel-based Macs it's not clear what advantages, if any, GTP might have that would matter to me.