Must I delete my Win 7 before installing OSX?

[zephyrs]

Do I have to erase my hd before installing OSX or can I install it on a separate partition and keep Windows 7?

 

I'll be installing on a netbook and backing all my Win 7 stuff is going to be such a pain

[FakeSteez]

I wouldn't if I were you. If you mess up on your mac os x install, you might not be able to boot up AT ALL. Fortunately, when that happened to me, i was able to go back on winXP and fix it.

[Hangten]

I would ghost your Windows install using Hiron's Boot CD. Link to download site

 

Not sure what hardware you might have (external storage) so this might not be possible but it would be a great idea to use separate drives and leave room so you can have a patricians to backup and Clone your hard work for OSX. The thing that you need to do is have full access to the drive being cloned so you need at least two running installs of OSX and thats relatively easy with todays huge HDD.

 

Carbon Copy Cloner... will save your bacon

 

Again don't get into a situation without preparedness and carefully thinking through everything. I don't want to see that you updated and botched your install and can't recover.

 

Hint: you need to reinstall Chameleon to the cloned drive to boot from it, If Chameleon is on a USB or another boot drive it will boot your cloned drive. Although if you failed to install Chameleon to the new cloned drive the drive can't boot if its the set bootable drive considering the bootloader isn't installed on it.

[goguda]

You should just be able to install it on another partition. Just make sure the partition is completely erased, because it can cause the installer to fail if it isn't.