Hello. I got an imac for $40 at a garage sale. It has 256MB of RAM and a PPC 500mhz processer. It came with the restore disk for Mac OSX 10.1.2. For some reason the mac restore disk does not see the hard drive, so I can't restore it. I have already tried different hard drives and I still couldn't get it to find it. I have tried installing linux and it finds the hard drive just fine and it installs. But the linux distros' I have tried are so slow on it that they are unusable. I would like to get this computer working again. Hopefully with OSX, but a linux distro would be fine too. Please help me. I don't want to be out my $40 and have a big paperweight around.

You don't want to use OS X 10.1.2. Hardly any current software works on it, and it's awfully buggy and unstable (and slow!). Get Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger (the previous version, the current is 10.5). It runs very well on PPC machines with low memory. Once you have Tiger 10.4 (you can buy it on eBay cheap), boot from the disc. Choose Disk Utility from the Utilities menu. Select your hard drive and erase it completely, which will redo the partition. The 10.4 installer should be able to see the hard drive afterwards. Hope this helps! Joshua Coventry Mac dude

I was not able to find a Tiger 10.4 CD Version. This computer does not have a DVD drive. I could get Panther 10.3 off ebay for real cheap. Should I put a Linux distro on the computer, or should I install Panther?

I'd go with Panther over Tiger, it runs much better on older machines.

I am trying to get my hands on a copy of Panther. I found some on ebay that I will start to bid on. I also found some 512MB RAM on ebay for real cheap that I will purchase.

I got the Panther Discs and a 512mb stick of RAM off ebay. I will post back when I get them in the mail.

I got Panther installed. I am now just waiting for the RAM. Before I installed Panther I replaced the 20GB Drive with a 60GB one. Thanks for the help.