I have been running 8.5 for a few days both on the Headgap Server and on my machine at the office. I really do like it. I would highly recommend anyone installing it that you get the very latest hard drive drivers and install them (after backing up) before attempting and install. If you have an apple drive after booting from the CD run the First Aid program until you get a clean bill of health and then run the formatting program. If it says it can format this drive then you can simply go to the menu bar and pull down to update drivers. This won't erase your drive (hopefully) but will simply update the driver on your hard drive. After restarting from the CD again run repair once more and then install 8.5. On FWB formatted drives update your program to 2.5.3 and follow the sames steps I outlined above. I don't use any other software for formatting simply because nobody else keeps up with anything. I used to use Anubis or Silverlining etc. but it would be six months after an upgrade before their software caught up. If you choose to use something else I would contact the company to see if they have done any testing.
I always clean install. I use a program called MOSH (Mac OS Helper) to move all my old prefs and extensions etc. It labels all moved items red so it is easy to see which files get moved into your new system folder. The latest version is up in the Mac Download Area under OS8.5 folder. It moved everything but my fonts and worked straight up on my office machine. I was upgrading from 8.1 though.
I also moved a few other utilities for 8.5 in that folder. Most notably the Sherlock helper files. Just unstuff and drag them to your closed system folder to install. There is a file called 117sherlock.sit that contains 117 helper files all in one archive and really adds a lot of choices to your searching. You will need to turn the memory panel up on Sherlock though if you have it add a lot of choices.
I also put up dock manager which takes up where Apple's new appearance manager takes off. Seems stable and performs some useful functions.
Check the Updaters folder for new additions as well since some of them help problems brought out by OS 8.5. *=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-* | Bob Nunn - Operator Headgap | E-mail: headgap@headgap.com | *=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-* | Operator Headgap Web BBS | V.34 Modem : (901) 759-1542 | | Supporting Mac, 64&128, Amiga | 33.6k Support: (901) 759-1543 | *=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-* | Visit our Telefinder Site at: bbs.headgap.com - port 1474 | | Visit our Telnet Site at: telnet://bbs.headgap.com:1474 | | Visit our WWW Site at: http://www.headgap.com | | New IP Address: 206.30.217.170 - Now with Fast ISDN Web Access! | *=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-* | New Headgap Bookstore http://www.headgap.com/aboutbooks.html | *=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-*
