G4 Mini not seeing new hard drive

[ScienceofSpock]

Howdy yall,
I was recently gifted a G4 Mini for a small project I'm working on, and discovered it had a bad hard drive. It will see the hard drive, but will not read or write to it. I ordered a new 160GB WD Scorpio Blue ATA/100 5400rpm drive and swapped it out, and now it will not see the hard drive at all.

This is my first time messing with Apple products, but I have been working with PC hardware for a very long time.

I don't know what to do next. If this was a PC, I'd jump into BIOS and make sure the drive was showing up there, but the mini uses OpenFirmware, which is something I have no clue about.

Any pointers from the experts?

[blazer]

Boot to your restore or OS X DVD disk (hold down C key) and see if the drive shows up in Disk Utility. If so, you can format the drive there.
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1.42GHz Mac mini
2.0GHz Core 2 Duo Mac mini
2.0GHz Core 2 Duo Mac mini (2009)
2.5GHz Core i5 Mac mini (2011)
24" Dell LCD & 42" Sharp TV
EyeTV 250 Plus
1G, 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G iPod nanos
16GB 3G iPhone

[macmanmacman]

Question did you upgrade the firmware the g4 mac mini maxes out at a 120 gig's just like the silver g4 towers did you need to upgrade to the latest firmware in order for the mini to boot with that drive

[Smithcraft]

OWC lists drives up to 320GB for the 1.25GHz mini, so I'm not sure a firmware update is needed.

SC
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Grumpy old man of computing.

[Desktop] G4 mini - 1.5Ghz 1GB 80GB HDD - Newer miniStack v2 500GB - 10.5.8

[Media System] Intel i5 mini - 2.33Ghz 8GB 500GB HDD - 4 x Hitachi 2TB HDD in a qBOX-SF - 10.7.5 (Thanks Phil!)

Make sure it has pins!

[macmanmacman]

yes you can go up to 320 gig after the firmware update i had to do this recently on a mini that the hard drive took a massive dump