Restore from Tiger backup to reformatted Leopard drive?

[raindelay]

My boot drive failed. I want to upgrade from Tiger to Leopard. If I reformat the drive using Leopard, does this mean I can not do a complete restoration from my backup? That is, will SuperDuper! want to restore the operating system (Tiger)? Will I have to restore file by file?

Details:

Yesterday I decided to upgrade to Leopard and started the installation from a new disk purchased from the Apple Store. The installation failed and the message said the drive had to be reformatted. I can no longer access or mount the drive.

I have a PowerMac G4 (new in November 2002), currently running Tiger OS X (10.4.11).
Specs:
Dual 1 GHz PowerPC G4
2GB DDR SDRAM
2 80GB hard drives (separate physical drives, not partitions). One HD is my boot drive, the other for additional storage. I have complete and current backups of both drives.

I am now working from the bootable backup on a Glyph drive, connected to my Mac via Firewire-400.

This is the second time I’ve had a problem with this boot drive. I reformatted it about a year ago. Would you advise giving up on the drive and making my second drive the boot drive?

Thanks!