reinstalling OS on ibook g4

Looks like I am fated to work on G4's.

OK, I got a G4 that needed a new hard drive and now that I have replaced it and reinstalled OSX I have two hard drives with information on them.

1. an external 500GB that I was told I could use to do the reinstall and
2. the replaced hard drive that I have placed in an enclosure.

The 500GB attaches via firewire but when I do a window comes up saying that I have plugged in a drive that can not be read, did I want to initialize or format.

The original hard drive comes up and is easily read.

My questions are:

Do I initialize the 500GB drive? Will that allow me to restore information or will it wipe the drive? With the original drive, can I just copy over the information to the same folder on the new drive (ie Library to Library)?

Thanks

Kando,

You can click "initialize" safely without wiping the drive, but there's a good chance that if it's saying the drive can't be read, it won't mount at all.

If the hard drive has an Intel version of OS X on it, it cannot be used to install OS X on your G4.  My guess is that's the problem.

Thanks, I don't think that was it. The 500gb Firewire external was supposed to have a backup from the original internal hard drive and that was how the restore was to be done. It is a PowerPC so no Intel. Don't know why it came up that way.

The original hard drive in the usb enclosure worked well enough that I was able to copy the Library and a couple of other folders over to the new hard drive. I did not do any of the applications since that folder seemed to be missing. The user has those disks so no problem there. I think they are just going to reformat the 500gb and use it for storage.

Thanks for the answers.

No problem!