Q: How to wipe a G4 Mac?
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Sep 25, 2015 8:32 AMby Jan Hedlund,The earliest operating system to be sold by Apple appears to be Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6), which cannot be used with a Power Macintosh G4. You may be able to buy an appropriate Mac OS X 10.4 or 10.5 system disc (retail, not a machine specific version for another model) from a reseller.
Otherwise, you may want to test an old PowerPC version (try a search for dban-2.0.0_powerpc.iso) of a utility called DBAN. One can burn a CD-R from the iso file. One can then start (hold down the C key) a Power Macintosh computer (at least this works with G3 models) from this disc, and then launch the wiping utility. This may or may not work with your G4 model.
An Ubuntu "live CD" (probably not one of the newer versions) could possibly also be useful (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerPCFAQ).
