Installing hard drive / OS on Power Mac G4

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I recently came into 3 power mac G4's (all different speeds, 933mhz, 1.25ghz and 1.33 ghz) as well as 5 G5's. I've successfully installed and SATA hard drive and OS X 10.5 on the G5. I bought some IDE drives for the G4's and when I plug them in and turn on the unit (with the 10.4 system disk in the drive) all I get is a folder flashing a question mark in the middle of the screen. On the G5 I got to the disk utility right away to format the drive before installing the software.

Any ideas as to what might be going on? I did attach both wires to the hard drive, even tried it in both available bays on the G4 with no luck. What am I missing?
 
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Your Mac's Specs
Silver M1 iMac 512/16/8/8 macOS 11.6
G'day and welcome to the forums.

Tell us about the Tiger disk? Sounds like a silver grey model specific disc whereas you need the black retail install DVD. And for what it is worth each of the G4's is also capable of running Leopard.
 
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G'day and welcome to the forums.

Tell us about the Tiger disk? Sounds like a silver grey model specific disc whereas you need the black retail install DVD. And for what it is worth each of the G4's is also capable of running Leopard.

Sorry, gave you the wrong info...I'm installing the 10.4 on my MacBook Pro. I'm using the same disk as I did for the G5.
 
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Well it depends on the model of the MacBook Pro. If it is a model such as a model 4.1 2008, you cannot install Tiger on it. It originally came with Leopard and you cannot go backwards from that.

Earlier MBP came with OS X.4.9 so any earlier version also would not install. As a rule of thumb no going backwards on any model. Lack mod drivers etc.
 

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