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Found an old iBook G3 M6497 at an estate sale, so I bought it for $2 in hopes to restore it to its original glory. It did not come with any install or recovery disks. This is my first purchase of a Apple device since my old iPod that broke, so please bear with me.

I knew right away that the hard drive was shot, so I followed the iFixIt tutorial to replace the hard drive with a new, 40GB IDE HDD. So this hard drive is brand new and not formatted to an OS X Extended partition, which may be part of the problem.

I burned an install CD from this website which hosts old version of MacOSX. Everything boots up correctly, by holding the C key down when turning on the computer. I get to the installer wizard, and I get all the way to the 'Select Destination' part of the install, and this is where I get stuck.

The installer doesn't show a hard drive partition, so I can't install it anywhere. I know that I need to format the hard drive, but I didn't have the tools to mount it on my Windows machine to pre-format it before putting it in the computer. I burned a live-cd of Ubuntu 12.04 for PowerPC architecture, and tried to boot to an environment to format the hard drive, but I can't get past a couple kernel panics that I'm encountering (not sure if it's a bad CD burn or Ubuntu not liking the computer...).

So, my question:

  • How can I format this new HDD to OS X Extended?

Other sources say to just open the terminal from the installer and use fdisk, but I don't see a way to do that, closing the installer window just restarts the computer, and there are no other programs to run.

Select a Destination blank

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  • It's been a while since I've dealt with pre-Intel Macs, but back then there might not have been a utilities menu on the disks... Also, people at the Ubuntu Stack Exchange may be able to help you with the kernel panics.
    – Kisa Ayano
    Commented Nov 22, 2016 at 3:08
  • Yea I might try to figure that out. I'm also looking into booting from USB, so I don't have to keep burning CDs. But i'm also not sure if that's possible on this old machine, and I'm also not sure how to write to a USB to make it bootable from a PowerPC machine. I'll probably have to look that up too. I appreciate you responding!
    – ToastyMallows
    Commented Nov 22, 2016 at 3:20
  • No problem! You could also borrow a friend's mac, swap drives, and use a more recent version of the installer.
    – Kisa Ayano
    Commented Nov 22, 2016 at 3:23
  • Did you look at that iFixIt teardown? I don't want to open this thing again, it takes an hour to get the hard drive out lol. I'll take a look at later PPC installers, that's a good idea.
    – ToastyMallows
    Commented Nov 22, 2016 at 3:26
  • @klanomath it was originally 15GB IDE, but I found a cheap replacement online that's 40GB IDE. Are you thinking it's too big to recognize?
    – ToastyMallows
    Commented Nov 22, 2016 at 4:47

1 Answer 1

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So, as it turns out OS X 10.1 DOES come with Disk Utility, but you need to access it BEFORE you start the installer! If you start the installer and move past the Introduction section, you cannot get back to the Disk Utility, you have to restart the computer!

So, to format my new hard drive:

  • Booted up with the OS X 10.1 CD in the CD-ROM drive, held C to boot to the CD
  • After first load, BEFORE selecting a language in the dialog
  • Go to Installer > Open Disk Utility... in the menu bar at the top
  • It found my new HDD in the side menu
  • Erase and partition it from the separate tabs
  • Close the Disk Utility and go back to the installer wizard

Your HDD should now show up under the Select a Destination menu in the wizard!

The YouTube video of the installer that klanomath posted was a huge help. I'm reposting it here for future people:

Mac OS X 10.1 Puma: Installation and first boot

Thanks!

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