Well, it was an eye opener as to the “user friendly” Mac system. I stopped by a company in town here that had a G4-400 tower that they’d be willing to let go (they want a bit much, but I figure I’d check it out anyway). The box had a linux installed at one point, and I wanted to see how the Mac OS performed, so I had come armed with an OS X CD. Pop it in, click, wirr, wait, wait, wait, then the lickable blue screen came up. Go through a standard install wizard, click click click, and then to the screen where you choose the hard drive partition to install.
Nothing listed.
Reboot, same thing. Install a different hard drive, same thing. Make sure that the hard drive is actually spinning up, same thing. Replace the IDE cable, same thing. Go into the “BIOS” (open firmware) and wipe it, reset to defaults, etc, same thing. Wiggle cords, same thing. Reset the BIOS again, same thing. Curse at it….. same thing.
Ended up coming home.
Got an email from the guy there who was fighting with it with me saying he finally figured it out. On the first screen of the installer there was an option (somewhere, no clue where) to deal with give you a disk editor or something. Apparently there was a linux partition on there and the installer in it’s ultimate wisdom decided to not even show a full drive (or give any other indication that it even saw the hard drive period). Once the linux partition was wiped out it saw it just fine and everything went nice and smoothly.