So this past week I finally upgraded my machine to Leopard.I won’t get into why it took me so long to hop on the bandwagon, but once I had install disc in-hand, I was still a little hesitant about upgrading because of some complications with rEFit.
People said upgrading would disable the rEFit boot menu, but could be easily fixed by just reinstalling rEFit.But the real sticky point is that because rEFit is installed, the Leopard installer does not recognize your Tiger partition. It slaps a yellow exclamation point on the drive, and says you can’t upgrade. Which leaves you with only the option to do an erase-install… lame.
So first, I made a bootable backup of my drive with SuperDuper!, just in case something went horribly wrong, but also so I could manually copy all my files back over after the upgrade. I also set aside my bookmarks, address book info, etc.
Then, proceeded to do an erase-install of Leopard…After the install was done, it asked me if I wanted to migrate any information over from another computer. It recognized that I had my external drive plugged in, and let me do a complete migration from my backup drive… awesome! It took a little over a hour and a half to do the transfer, but saved me the effort of manually reinstalling all my applications, copying over files by hand, and setting up preferences.
So I had Leopard installed with all my files, just as if I had done a regular upgrade. But just as people had warned, when I restarted my computer I was no longer getting the rEFit boot menu. I didn’t really care to fix it right away, so a couple of days went by.
But then one afternoon after I got home from work, I started up my machine, and lo-and-behold… there was rEFit. And it let me boot into Ubuntu with no trouble. Which left me rather confused as to why it all of a sudden started working again. But I ain’t complaining 
[update] Well… at least it was working. I tried rebooting tonight and rEFit wasn’t showing up. Weak.