iMac G5 Isight Hard Drive issue - please help.

Hello everyone.

It looks like the hard drive on my G5 PowerPC with Isight is toast. From what I've been told it's extremely difficult to change out the hard drive on this model. Could I just connect an external hard drive with a firewire and boot from the set-up disks and install the operating system on the external hard drive? I could then just boot from the external drive. Does that make sense and what problems might I run into? Thank you.

Tiga

That works perfectly, actually! I ran a G3 iMac for years with a FireWire hard disk, which is what you must use as well. PowerPC Macintoshes can't boot from USB

Thanks - is there anything I should consider before buying an external drive? Should it say "mac compatible" or anything like that?