Q: I recently had the HD in my ibook G4 crash. I replaced it with a new one and now while im booting up with the OS X cd for OS installation, it wont look at the HD to install the OS on. So I got to disk utility and it recognizes the HD but for some reason the HD will not show up for me to select it during OS installation. Do I need to go threw an initiallization process to get the HD to show up for that?
A: You got it. The most common format for new hard drives is FAT32, a Windows format. Boot to the install disc. Open Disk Utility, choose the "Erase" tab. This is where you can erase it and choose the format "Mac Extended (journaled)". By the way, you can also partition the drive. Partitions are like divisions of a drive and they appear just as if they were separate drives. There are several reasons why you might want to do that such as easier problem fixes, less chance of data loss, faster file access, and better performance due to less fragmentation. Now is the time to make that decision as partitioning also erases the drive. I have had partitioned drives for more than 15 years now on all my computers. Wouldn't want it any other way. To see the pros and cons, Google "Mac partition or not". I have OS X on a partition of 20 GB. That leaves plenty of room for updates and such. The remaining part of the drive is for my movies, songs, photos and other files. If the partition develops some format corruption that can't be fixed by Disk Utility, I can copy the few important files from it to one of the other partitions and do an erase-install on the OS X partition. That way I don't risk loosing any of the data on the bigger partition.