Thanks, Artie. I know you tried to walk me through but I still had questions. Nothing is very straightforward to me.
Joemike suggested cloning Mavericks over to my empty miscellaneous partition and use that. That sounds like a plan. Also, cloning Sierra when I get my new computer and using that in my backup computer. I couldn't get back to him because this kept coming up: There was a problem looking up this post in our database. I reported it but it's still happening. For some reason I couldn't find his post directly by using search.
Anyway, I can always try that. When I do it, I will ask for help.
Thanks, as always.
Rita
Any time I"ve seen that "There was a problem...." message it has meant that the post in question was deleted.
Stop agonizing; when the time comes, we'll figure it all out.
What connections has your external drive got...FireWire, USB, both? I ask because you need to think about how you're going to do your migration, and then, after you've migrated you info to your new MBP you can give some thought to which OSs you want to keep, and where.
And as for joemike's "cloning Sierra when I get my new computer and using that in my backup computer", a few posts back I suggested "And then again, you can forego the Mavericks restoration and restore or clone Sierra to your old MBP after you've got your new one up, migrated, and running."
By the way, I've been ignoring your post a while back in which you asked a bunch of questions because it seemed pointless to answer before you're ready to proceed...too far before the fact.
