Panther and Tiger on one mac???

[dnanian]

Hey, no sad faces here, Ed.

"Backup - all files" is just as bootable as a Safety Clone. The difference is that it doesn't share any information, which is exactly what you were looking for. (If you can accept the sharing, you can keep the Safety Clone, which will work, too -- but will share your user files and some applications, if you chose that version of the Sandbox.)

You can't just eject one partition out of three: when you try, I'm pretty sure all will unmount. Spotlight won't "hurt" your Panther drive, but it was just something that would touch it -- and you sounded like you wanted to "vault" the clone more than anything else.

Note that I've got a Panther Safety Clone here on my system that I use all the time, and it's been touched by Tiger. No problems there, but try not to use Panther disk utilities on a Tiger volume -- Apple specifically recommends against that, probably because the disk format has changed a bit in Tiger. While I don't think you can hurt a Panther-sourced volume, I'd avoid it nevertheless.