Power Mac G4 Upgrades...

Hey guys,
I recently had the chance to pickup a power mac G4. Dual 1GHz CPU-1GB ram-80GB HD. It's currently running OS X 10.3.9 i believe. I was thinking of upgrading to a 200GB hard drive that i have laying around that i'm not using and also upgrading to OS X 10.5, along with more memory, if Leopard requires more.

I'm in the IT field and i've been using strictly Windows PC's so i've been using windows pc's my whole life...last mac i used was an Apple IIe, if i remember right...I've built several pc's but Mac's are new to me. But i always wanted one, since i hear nothing but great things about them

It looks like swapping out the hard drive is similar to a pc. What about loading OX X 10.5 after the HD install? Any commands i need to know to get into any settings? Boot from cd-rom? Thanks for any info!

You can pop the new hard drive in as usual - keep the old hard drive installed as a slave so you can boot in to Panther.

You can boot in to your panther disk (10.3) and use Utilities > Disk Utility to format your old drive to Mac HFS Plus

After that you can just install Leopard and select the reformatted drive for a nice fresh install, then use  > System Preferences > Start-up Disk to choose between Panther or Leopard as your Start-up disk

Keep the slave with 10.3 Panther on it for a few weeks while you get Leopard to work.

To install Leopard just press C on start-up to boot up from the DVD, but there may be no need to boot from CD if you have 2 drives running