I recently acquired a G4 ibook from ebay. it came with no books, no disks and no information. of course the seller was not the original owner. I need to be able to see what operating system I have. not sure if it is tiger or leopard. The only thing I can come up with 10.4.11. I also do not have the original master password and would love to be able to reset it, but do not know how. Have been considering wiping the hard drive and re-installing OS. Any advice from anyone would be so helpful. I am new to the world of mac. Am really excited about getting started, but being new, I am sure I am going to have a lot of questions.
You will need a set of OS disks to do the reset and reinstall. All but the earliest iBook G4s were capable of Leopard 10.5. The first iteration with the 800MHz CPU were limited to OS 10.4.11 (Tiger).
OS disks are available on eBay, though expensive. Expect to pay $80 to $100 USD. And, this is critical:
MAKE SURE YOU PURCHASE RETAIL OS DISKS, NOT OEM!
Excuse the shout, but sometimes this point is hard to get accross. Retail disks are Black, OEM disks are Gray or Silver and are machine specific, thus will not work with your iBook.
Finding an OEM disk for your machine at this point is about like winning the lottery, not impossible, but don't hold your breath.