Converting a MBR-partitioned drive to APM for use on PPC G4

I am trying to replace the hard drive on an old 450 MHz PowerMac G4 (AGP Graphics) which I bought years ago off eBay for my young child to play with. Now I'd like to use this Mac again as a sandbox for learning how to integrate OSX into Windows dominated corporate networks.

The original internal drive is a 27 GB IDE Seagate Barracuda, and I'd like to install an available 80 GB Seagate drive, which at some point had been partitioned on an Intel PC (running Windows or Linux).

At first I wasn't aware that an incompatible partitioning scheme on PPC Macs might prevent this. I became suspicious only after numerous seemingly successful installs of OSX Tiger (on any 80 GB drive) the Mac would not recognize the drive (not even acknowledge its presence) after the subsequent reboot.

This was the case when attaching the drive internally. At one point I managed to execute a boot command (forgot which one) that took me to a prompt where I could select the external drive as the boot drive. However, this only worked when the drive was in an externall Firewire enclosure, AND only with the original drive still attached internally, AND I had to perform this manually at each reboot.

Finally my original drive died. Now I need to find a way to boot from the replacement drive installed internally. (Having a dozen barely used older drives available I'm too cheap to go out and buy a brand new one, especially since there's no guarantee that a new drive isn't already partitioned - and these days it's hard to find anything smaller than 160 GB anyway - the G4 only supports up to 128 GB.)

After much research I learned that the need for the proprietary Apple Partitioning Scheme (APS) on the PPC platform must be the issue. While the newer Intel-based Macs appear to come with an updated Disk Utility which provides the option to choose the partitioning method (between APS, GUID, and MBR) my original Tiger DVD does not have that option. Since this is my only Mac, and I paid dearly for the OSX Tiger upgrade a few years ago (and this Mac is only supposed to be a test environment) I am not inclined to buy another OSX disk/license at this time.

Despite scouring all the Mac forums I have not identified a practical way to get a bootable APM partition onto a hard drive once it's been spoiled with another partitioning scheme. Multiple seemingly successful OSX installs (during which I created brand new volumes with Disk Utility's Partitioning feature) end up with failure to recognize the drive upon reboot. I tried this with multiple drives from different manufacturers, although all of those drives at some point had Windows or Linux on them.
Any ideas on how to wipe a MBR-partitioned drive totally clean and force APM upon it would be greatly appreciated?
Am I possibly missing something else here?

Thanks

Great idea, unfortunately it didn't work

Thanks, TDM21!
It took me a while to get the Ubunto Live-CD to boot on that machine. GPARTED did in fact create a new partition scheme, using the 'mac' option.
However, after installing Tiger from the Tiger DVD the hard drive would still not be recognized. Booting with the Alt key takes me to the boot disk selector, which unfortunately shows blank. I'm about to give up and strip this thing to sell the good parts individually. Maybe the proceeds will pay toward a newer, better supported Apple model ;-)

TDM21 said:

The easiest way I can think of fixing the partition table without a Leopard DVD would be to run a Linux LiveCD that includes Gparted. I know Ubuntu has it and is probably the easiest to use. Head to http://cdimages.ubuntu.com/ports/releases/ to grab a Desktop CD for PowerPC. Release 7.10 should work for what you need. Just stay away from the 8.10 release because it won't boot without some special commands.

Once you've booted to the desktop, go up to System > Administration > Gnome Partition Editor. In Gparted there will be a drop down list on the right that will allow you to select your hard drive. With it selected go to the Device Menu and click on "Create Partition Table..." (older versions of Gparted called it "Set Disklabel." Regardless it should do the same thing). If you expand the Advanced menu, you will see a drop down list for all the different partition tables Gparted supports. Choose "mac" and click the Create Button. That should erase all the information off the drive and create an Apple Partition Map. You can then try rebooting your PowerMac from the Tiger DVD and check to see if Disk Utility will allow you to add an HFS+ partition.

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