Powerbook G4 HD replacement question

Hey all! I am replacing the HD in a 15" G4 Powerbook that I got for a great deal, knowing there would be a little work involved on it eventually (namely the hard drive). It went a little quicker than I would have liked and is no longer spinning up at all, and I just get the flashing folder w the question mark at bootup.

I have a new Seagate drive ready to go in, but of course can't clone the drive because the old drive is dead. I have a few different OSX installs on disk, but I think the previous owner set the preferences to not allow booting from any external disk as I cannot get it to go into firewire target mode (T on startup).

My question is then, if I wanted to install OSX on the drive prior to physically installing it, what might be some ways around this? I have a MBP that I could firewire the drive to and install from here, but don't know if I can install 10.3 or 10.5 onto a different laptop from a MPB running 10.6.

I have Drive Genius and can initialize the drive prior to installing it, though OWC notes that their drives are pre-formatted for OS9 already.

Any thoughts before I get back into the guts of my Powerbook?

Thanks!

Got it! Nevermind...lol!

Kind of an interesting sequence of events with this Powerbook that I got for $200 on Ebay a little while back. 15" 1.5ghz with 2GB ram installed already. Great condition other than a few dents where there was an obvious drop or two over its life (Front to the right and below the latch release, and rear in the middle of the hinge casing). Seriously, I understand that accidents happen, but for fook's sake...keep a hand on yer Mac!

I bought it with the understanding that it didn't boot up properly every time, but that it only happened about 1 in 5 or 6 times according to the former owner. I figured it to be either a slowly failing hard drive, or something software/OS related similar to problems that I'd been having with my other Powerbook running 10.3 until I upped it to 10.5.1.

The computer arrived a few weeks ago and it ran magnificently on 10.4.1 straight out of the box. It had the full MS Office suite, Adobe Creative Suite, and Macromedia Suite already installed so it seemed like this was someone's heavy duty use computer in its previous life, lending more credence to my diagnosis of a spent drive. I attempted to upgrade the OS to 10.5.1 like my other G4 PPC, but it wouldn't accept the install and kept telling me that the disk did not contain the necessary files and information in order to upgrade.

I could hear the telltale hard drive noises warning that it was pretty much on its last legs, and it finally crashed before I received my new Seagate 160gb drive after a few days delivery delay due to missing the FedEx guy.

Of course now I couldn't clone the drive because it was completely dead physically, and the previous owner had apparently locked out the ability to boot from the DVD drive. Nor could I get it to go into firewire target mode because of the previous owner's settings so things were looking pretty dim for a few minutes.

Ultimately I had boot with the alt/option key in order to install 10.2.7 from my original grey disks belonging to my other Powerbook. Once I got 2.7 on there, I could get it to recognize the Leopard install disk which I am now in the process of updating.

Wow. Fun process! And now I have a $300 Powerbook that runs like new!