Greetings, Sunrisetech. You're a little right, and a little wrong.

After reading your message, I took a system disk from a G4 mini (from my large collection of system disks) and booted a G4 iBook with it. True, I got an alert on the second screen that said I could not install system software on this computer from this disk. However, I successfully pulled down the Utilities menu over the undismissed alert and changed the password on the iBook. I rebooted to the iBook's internal drive to double-check, and it had indeed been changed.

I welcome the opportunity this discussion has given me to refine my knowledge of bundled system disks --they're not nearly as universal as I had thought. Perhaps my habits were indeed formed back in the OS9 days. Today I carry external drives with Panther, Tiger, and Leopard retail installers cloned onto them, and a full copy of TechTool Pro, so I never need to use system disks any more except maybe to use Pacifier to get a particular bundled app back. (If you partition the drive APF it will boot both PPC and Intel machines.)