Problems getting OS9.1 or OSX 10.3 to install

Question

Hello all,
I purchased a used Dual G4 Powermac recently in order to sit down and learn about macs in general. My business is starting to get support requests for Apple products and I would like to be able to be fully supportive to those customers.
Anyway when I bought this Dual G4 "Sawtooth" it had the hard drive removed from it because it contained sensitive company data. I set the G4 up on my desk, took a Maxtor 80gb PATA100 drive to connect to the system. It was one of my office drives that I use for various systems. It has an NTFS file system on it but I plan on deleting it all anyway.
I borrowed a friends OS9.1 3 disc CD set from his iMac to see if I could get it up and running. (I admit, I'm an OS geek). When powering on the system I immediately got an icon of a folder with a flashing apple 'face' and '?'. Someone told me I needed to hold the "C" key when booting to initiate booting from the CD-Rom. I did that and infact it booted to the 9.1 CD.
HOWEVER - upon a successful boot from the CD, I was able to manipulate around the desktop and view the contents on the CD. But when I tried to run the 9.1 OS Installer, I kept getting "System Error 199". In fact any executable I ran on the CD gave me "System Error 199". My friend suggested it was because I have a non formatted HFS+ drive in there. I didn't think that was the case because I tried to run the Disk Utility program to format the disc. That also gave me the "System Error 199" message.
Later that day he brought over his OSX 10.3 three disc CDs so we could install OSX. This time when holding the "C" key to boot from the CD, I was taken to a console/command prompt screen labled "OpenFirmware". I only had two choices, use the command 'mac-boot' or 'mac-shutdown'. When using the mac-boot command it just restarted the system and upon holding C again, it took me rightback to the OpenFirmware screen.
Does anyone have any ideas as to what is going on here? I'm completely a newb for macs although I've been a computer engineer/network engineer for PCs for years.
Brad

Answer 1

I tried formatting the drive to FAT32 but still nothing is recognizing the drive. The iMac CD's boot to 9.1 which is located on the CD. But like I mentioned previously I'm unable to run or execute any program because I get the dreaded System Error 199 message each time.
When I purchased this system there was no documentation or CD's included (as well as no hard drive). So the only thing I've had to work with is the 10.3 three discs and the two discs of this 9.1 OS. I have searched the net to possibly track down a copy of something else to at least get it booting, but no luck with that. If these two OS's I have here are limited to certain hardware, how do I identify between retail and hardware specific?
Also I came across a PC program called TransMac. It lets me format any hard drive to HFS+ file system. I actually formatted the hard drive to HFS+ and even had found a *.dmg file floating on the net of OS9.2. I had TransMac extract and install the files to the newly formatted HFS+ hard drive. When trying to boot from that I had absolutely no luck.
Since I'm from the PC world, I'm used to an installer popping up that isn't limited to certain hardware and automatically detecting and formatting as needed.