My iMac G5 crapped out and when I ran the disc utility it resulted in "Volume Mac HD failed error -9972 Volume 1 could not be repaired" HJ diags all passed. I tried Disc Warrior but when the directoryscreen came up the Mac HD was not an option. What goes?

On older OSs you need to go one step at a time: 10.3.7 to 10.3.8, then to 10.3.9.

And that third disc might contain that additional content (things like AppleWorks, at least according to the specs for your model). Before going in much deeper into the setup of the new OS, I'd recommend you to go back and reinstall the OS, taking the precaution of going into the Custom options and ensuring all (pertinent) options are selected.

Alternatively, you could also try inserting disc 1 again (not booting to it, but rather while the comptuer is running)... I vaguely remember the option of installing the additional software being on that disc.

Awesome on the AppleWorks install!

And for Tiger, you would need to buy the 10.4 disc There is only one kind (no "upgrade" to it exists, so to speak, since the same disc allows you to do all types of installations.) I would recommend trying to find a retail version of Tiger instead, though, since the ones that came with other systems might only work with those systems if they were part of a restore set. Conversely, a retail copy would work on any compatible system. A quick search on eBay yields several results for these.

A word to the wise: Not sure what your use for the computer is, exactly. But, just like you pointed out with your comment about Firefox, the software available for older OSs (such as 10.3 and 10.4) is usually not very good by modern standards, which means also that it is not very compatible with "modern" features. For example, Firefox 2 is not able to display content from a lot of sites, even "simple-looking" sites such as Gmail or Hotmail. Same with the version of Safari bundled with 10.3. Or, to give you another example, iTunes: the latest version you can run on 10.4 is iTunes 9.2. However, an iPhone 4 requires iTunes 10 to be able to sync with the computer, but that will only run on 10.5. And so on...

There are a lot of examples, and what it comes down to is that less and less software (and hardware) is supported by "older" operating systems. With that, and since you're buying a new OS anyway, you might want to consider jumping to 10.5 instead of Tiger. Appleworks 6 should still be compatible with it, you can run newer versions of iTunes and Safari, and you can also install most versions of most common browsers in it. And lastly, Leopard introduces Time Machine, which makes the whole backup/restore process much easier.

The downside is that your computer would run it a bit more slowly than it would run a previous OS (either 10.3 or 10.4) due to its higher system requirements, but it would run it nonetheless. It really depends on what you do with the computer, and on whether or not the extra features supported by Leopard are of any benefit for your daily use of the machine.