Replacing the main Hard Drive and reinstalling the OS X on G4 Tower MDD

[moxey]

Hello people,

I was thinking about trying to replace my main HD of 80gb, to a larger 500gb drive with a faster rpm.

My only concern is how am I going to reinstall my OS x 10.5 Leopard on to the new drive? my DVD drive has stopped working (so I can't boot with the disk.) and I've looked in to using a 8gb USB stick with the OS X on it, but I saw something about it can only boot from a Firewire port? as the USB is bus 1.

Any ideas on what I could do?

[Germany_chris]

Hello people,

I was thinking about trying to replace my main HD of 80gb, to a larger 500gb drive with a faster rpm.

My only concern is how am I going to reinstall my OS x 10.5 Leopard on to the new drive? my DVD drive has stopped working (so I can't boot with the disk.) and I've looked in to using a 8gb USB stick with the OS X on it, but I saw something about it can only boot from a Firewire port? as the USB is bus 1.

Any ideas on what I could do?

Carbon copy cloner still works with PowerPC..put the HD in one the alternate locations and clone the old to the new..

Or you could spend $10 on ebay for an IDE DVD burner. I bought one not to long ago out of a MP for my G5.

[harryb2448]

Set the new drive up as slave using the jumpers and pop into position two on your MDD. The IDE and power cables are there for a second hard drive. Format the drive Mac OS Extended, Apple Partition Map in partition, and use CCC or SuperDuper to clone the original drive. Take them both out, make the 500GB drive master and the 80GB drive slave and put them back in, 500GB on top in first position.

[moxey]

Hello again People.

Thanks for the advice on how I should replace my main HD and clone the original contents, great advice many thanks.

So I noticed I made a mistake I made and that the new HD can only goe up to 250gb IDE with a 7200 rpm and 8mb Buffer.

so when I was looking for a suitable second hand refurbished Hard Drive to buy I noticed that the Western Digital HD drive I want to get comes as Caviar Blue model?

Can any one tell me what the difference is compared to just a normal Caviar Hard Drive? The specs seem the same when I compare the two types of HD.

Would a Caviar Blue work okay in my G4 MDD?

Any ideas.