Try holding down C while booting to force a boot from the optical drive.
Once it boots, use disk utility to format the drive as HFS+/APM.
If you still have install issues, I'd suspect a bad hard drive. I've had drives that appear okay at first, but have serious issues once I start dumping data on them. Most of the ones I've had these sort of issues with have been Maxtor, although the problem probably isn't exclusive to them. One of the most painful ones was a 250gb Maxtor IDE hard drive, that, again, would format fine and show no issues. When I would start cloning onto it with CCC, it would go great at first, then slow to a crawl and finally stop before CCC would throw out an error. Attempting to repair the drive would give multiple unrepairable errors. Formatting it again would clear them all, only to give the same error. I finally put a couple of 170gr Keith-type slugs out a 357 Magnum through it to solve the problem for good
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Hello, MagicBoy.
I'll try that. I had already completely erased it and left it blank without reformatting it, but I believe it was kept as MBR.
I only have a Windows machine accessible to erase and format the drive. How would I go about setting it to APM without a Mac? Is that possible? 3rd party program?
Thanks,
-Hunter
You show an iBook G4 in post #4-I'd suggest using that with an external hard drive adapter/enclosure(USB ones are cheap on Ebay, Firewire ones are a bit more expensive but are handy with Macs).